Good to see people catching up with the concept. Apparently the Greens had a point when they suggested that the Administration was dragging its feet on the issue. Its a very timely release of information on their part, passing the buck to the next guy.
Events in the Bay Area sponsored by Churchill Club
If you are a churchill group member, these are some of the events they are putting together. If you want to attend and are not a member, you may have to pay a higher price for admission. You can also join the club and attend if you wish to do so:
Wed, July 30: 5th Annual Good Wine and Good Company: Old World Meets New World (San Francisco) (members only)
This event will feature California winemakers who are making tasty wine using Old World methods. Featured speakers include Louis Kapcsándy of Kapcsándy Family Winery, and Michael Brill of Crushpad. Please visit www.churchillclub.org for further details and to RSVP.
Mon, August 4: Hollywood, YouToo? Finding the Money and Eyeballs in Web Video (San Francisco)
Speakers: Nathan Coyle, co-head digital, Creative Artists Agency; Brent Friedman, executive producer and head writer, Electric Farm Entertainment/Gemini Division; Jordan Hoffner, director of content partnerships at YouTube; Ziv Navoth, VP of Marketing and Business Development, Bebo; and Frank Rose, WIRED, moderator. Please visit www.churchillclub.org for further details and to RSVP.
Thu, August 14: Election 2008: Cutting Through the Spin (Location TBA)
Speakers: Paul Jay, CEO and Senior Editor, The Real News Network; Ray McGovern, ex-CIA analyst, advising Ronald Reagan; Matt Furman, ex-CNN SVP and current Google executive, moderator. Please visit www.churchillclub.org for further details
Tue, August 19: Upsizing: Breaking the Billion Dollar Benchmark (Palo Alto)
Speakers: Mark Templeton, CEO, Citrix Systems; Maynard Webb, CEO, LiveOps, former COO, eBay; Dave Thomson, award-winning author, moderator. Please visit www.churchillclub.org for further details and to RSVP.
Thu, September 25: Churchill Club Annual Dinner: An Evening with Steve Ballmer (Santa Clara) (members only)
Please visit www.churchillclub.org for further details and to RSVP.
A new search engine created by former engineers from Google Inc. launched Sunday night, claiming to cover three times as many Web pages as Google. Cuil!!
Former Google engineer launches new search engine
Has anyone checked them out yet?
Here is an excellent article on Darwin and why his work matters even though there were others before him who presented Evolution in one form or another as an answer to questions about the origins of life.Darwinmania as a write up covers the difference very well.
Evening with the President’s Son at “Dinner with the President”
I was able to make it to Stanford for the screening of the movie “Dinner with the President” after struggling through a rough day at work.
The movie itself was well edited and captured a fairly well covered perspective among the educated elites of Pakistan who have access to the corridors of power in that country. The movie begins with the saga on October 12 1999 when in a bloodless coup, General Musharaf overthrew the government of Nawaz Sharif and Pakistan Muslim League. The movie focuses in on (possibly) Mz. Sabiha Sumar’s (Co-Filmmaker with Sachithanandam Sathananthan) family in Pakistan debating the merits and demerits of the coup and Democracy in Pakistan. It moves on to Mz. Sumar’s dinner with the President himself. The dinner is shown to be a cordial affair with President Musharraf’s wife and Mother in attendance as well. The President goes through several points that Pakistani public and audience have heard him repeat several times over the course of the past several years. For an American audience, however, and there were plenty of them there at this screening, some of it may have been new information.
Musharraf is shown on three different occasions, one during this dinner appointment somewhere in 2005. His dinner footage is edited to include interviews of people from the street and also the members of a local community inside the tribal area beyond Khyber Pass. Mz. Sumar talks up some of the points with these elders and menfolk, that resonate with the audience about an Islamic state and system. There is a short snippet of an interview with Qazi Hussein Ahmed as well.
The funniest bit was provided by the Kingmaker himself, Ch. Shujaat Hussain of Gujrat. Apparently, it was impossible for him to look the lady or the camera in the eye and complete a sentence without dozing off. The audience had quite a chuckle at his expense throughout the longest couple of minutes in the movie when he was on the screen.
The second bit is from 2006 when Mz. Sumar is called upon by the President himself as he was apparently interested in how the movie was turning out. This one was a relatively short one and mostly focused on the President’s responses to quotations from the interviews done by Mz. Sumar herself throughout Pakistan.
The third bit is from 2007 after Benazir’s return where Musharraf is seen defending his move of providing cover to Benazir under NRO (National Reconciliation Ordinance - This order basically retracted all the cases filed in the courts by the Pakistan government against BB and her husband Asif Ali Zardari). The filmmaker is visibly frustrated and dissappointed at this action and shares it with the President and he offers the most obvious defense - Let the people decide if they want to forgive Benazir or not since the courts could not do that in a decade.
The movie ends after the first assasination attempt at BB at her arrival in Karachi on Oct 18th 2007. There is an ending snippet which is rather powerful where a poor Sindhi family is shown having dinner in a modest hut.
In my opinion, the movie misses out on the opportunity to capture the mood in Pakistan especially after March 09th 2007. It does not provide any coverage to the events in Karachi on May 12th. In fact, there is no mention of it at all. There is one place towards the end, and before the third meeting with the President where the lawyers and their struggle is mentioned but no details are provided about what Musharraf thought of them.
The thing that stood out for me and really set the tone of the movie, atleast from my vantage point was when early in the movie on arrival at the Dinner table where Musharraf was already seated, Mz. Sumar asked her much older male companion, to desist from taking a seat and offer salaams first. I was not sure what to make of that. There is obviously the aspect of respect for your host. I can understand that. It got me thinking though. Was it a case of showing respect for a gracious host or was it an instinctive deference to the presence of power. I got my answer during the coarse of the three interviews that were done with the strong man. The questions thrown at him were such softballs that it was abundantly clear that he is not even thinking about his answers since he had become used to rattling off the answers as a routine. These were very typical questions about the opinions of the General that have been available to anyone who has spent just a tad bit of effort exploring the General’s career. He is offered chances to talk without interruption or offered corrections by Mz. Sumar.
There are tidbits of Karachi’s party culture in the movie as well with people swaying to experimental music and drugs on a beautiful seashore. There was an interesting political perspective that was expressed by an unknown girl from that group where she indicated that Democracy is a tough sell in Pakistan since 95 percent of Pakistan comprised of people barely making it from one day to next. I thought that was a very poignant admission on the part of the movie and a member of the upper class who seem to be willing to apparently admit to a problem with their noses covered with one hand and attempting to shoo away the problem with the other.
The movie was followed by a discussion with Bilal Musharraf (Musharraf’s son and a Stanford Alum himself) who attended the screening. He answered a few questions from the audience about the situation in Pakistan. He came across as a straightforward person and answered most of the questions by lacing them with his own experiences in Pakistan. He also was candid enough to admit that there were matters and concerns in and about Pakistan where he had no opinion to offer since he did not necessarily have the information or the expertise required to analyze and formulate an opinion if the information was available.
Overall, a less than decent attempt out of a golden opportunity by Mz. Sabiha Sumar and Mr. Sachithanandam Sathananthan. Here’s to hoping that they will do better in the future.
Documentary “Dinner with the President: A Nation’s journey”
I got this in email, thanks to a friend (A.H. Cemendtaur).
7:30pm
Tuesday, February 12th
Bishop Auditorium, Graduate School of Business
A Documentary Delving Into the Unseen:
Dinner with the President: A Nation’s Journey
Directed by Sabiha Sumar, Sachithanandam Sathananthan.
Nominated at the Sundance Film Festival, 2008.
“An impressive documentary focused on exploring what democracy might mean for Pakistan. The film has stunningly close access to President Musharraf and illustrates some striking contradictions to what we hear in the media.” – Sundance Film Festival Visitor
“From on-the-street interviews to audiences with religious leaders to dinner with the President of Pakistan, the film takes the temperature of a culture on issues from politics to women’s rights.” –IMDB
Dinner with the President: A Nation`s Journey
World Documentary
Pakistan, 2007, 80 mins, Color
“Are dictatorship and democracy mutually exclusive? In a country with cultures as ancient and complex as Pakistan’s, the answer to what the future holds is not straightforward. Projected to be the world’s third-most-populous country by 2050, Pakistan has stood at the crossroads of East and West for centuries. Now in the “nuclear club” and an emerging secular democracy amidst neighboring Islamic theocracies, Pakistan plays a critical role in America’s war on terrorism. President Pervez Musharraf has long been seen as a key United States ally in the region–a reputation that does not always serve him well in Pakistan.
In Dinner with the President: A Nation’s Journey, Pakistani filmmakers Sabiha Sumar and Satha Sathananthan request a dinner with their country’s leader, and to their surprise, the request is granted. The family dinner with Musharraf and his mother forms the backdrop to a filmic journey through contemporary Pakistan as the filmmakers forego the headlines and search the country for deeper answers.”
More information: http://pas.stanford.edu
Sponsored by:
Members of the MBA Class of ’07, GSB
Stanford Film Society
Pakistanis at Stanford
Yep. I am.
I am concerned about this economy and where its going and I don’t think anybody has a plan to help this situation. The joke that is the Stimulas plan from this government will not help in anyway. In fact, it is an insult to the intelligence of individuals who happen to pay attention to what it actually means. The checks in the mail are almost like the few dollars you throw at an annoying beggar, partly for the self-aggrandizing ego pump and rest for him/her to go as far away from you as possible. Continuous proding of the interest rates is another issue because it does not help anyone in the long run. What it does is provide more credit, which is the last thing this heavily indebted nation needs.
I think the solution lies with all of us and more so with the residents of the Wadi than anyone else. We are supposed to be the innovators and leaders in IT industry which by all arguments is the fastest growing industry on the globe. Distributed Decisions here effect the economies around the world more than anything else. I don’t perceive this argument as an ego pump because the facts are there for everyone to see. The market changing effects on a global scale that innovation here has is a phenomenon in and itself which markets ignore at their own peril. I think its here that decisions need to be daring, strategic and innovation oriented. This doesn’t just apply to the CEOs and the Corner office occupants. This applies to ALL of us. All of us need to figure out how to best stimulate this economy. Be it in developing our own skills or helping and leading people around us, Direct reports, Friends, Colleagues, to develop theirs. If we continue to do that, we will be able to pull up against a wall of the wave that people seem to see coming.
Mehfil-e-Urdu Adab at PACC in Sunnyvale
I attended a Mehfil-e-Ghazal last month organized by the Urdu Academy of SFBA. It was well organized except it was not very well attended. They are now arranging another event which they hope to continue organizing once every month. The particulars of the event are as follows:
WHERE: PAKISTANI AMERICAN CULTURE CENTER (PACC)
830 Stewart Drive , Sunnyvale, CA 94085
WHEN: Sunday, January 20, 2008
TIME: 3:00 TO 6:00 p.m.
PROGRAM:
1. ESSAYS ON THE FOLLOWING TWO POETS AND RECITATION OF THEIR POETRY
a. JANAB MIR SOUZ (CLASSICAL POET)
b. JANAB MAHIR-UL-QADRI (MODERN POET)
2. TANQEEDI NASHIST
a. NAZM BY SAEED KHAN SAHIB
3. PARVEEN SHAKIR (A Tribute to the legendary poetess) BY Noshi Gilani
SPONSORED BY:
PAKISTANI AMERICAN CULTURE CENTER
