Archive - May 1, 2011

Memories.3

During the decade of 1970’s, many foreign visitors came to Iran for business or as tourist. They all loved Iranian food and hospitality>>>

Memories.2

As I was growing up in a middle class family in Tehran, there were more shops, cinemas, and parks opening>>>

Out of Luck

It is nearly impossible to determine the degree of stability within the opaque world of Iranian politics, but a number of incidents have come to light recently that reveal deepening fissures within the regime. On display is an increasingly bitter fight, verging on an irrevocable break, between conservative supporters of the present system of clerical government, as epitomized by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and the hardliners backing the non-clerical president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad>>>

Measure of Equality

At this juncture, then, we face the weighty question of what we seek to achieve with the opportunity we have acquired. What are the choices before us? Many models of collective living are on offer and being championed by various interested parties. Are we to move towards an individualistic, fragmented society, wherein all feel liberated to pursue their own interests, even at the expense of the common good? Will we be tempted by the lures of materialism and its beholden agent, consumerism? Will we opt for a system that feeds on religious fanaticism?>>>

Obama: Osama Bin Laden is dead

Osama Bin Laden has been killed and his body is presumably in US custody.

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Copy vs. Original

Ten interesting movies by really good directors don’t add up to one boring movie by Abbas Kiarostami. His film, Certified Copy, has given the world a new Mona Lisa’s Enigmatic Smile. Wondering whether the two film characters are really married or not, pivoting the work on a self-invented puzzle, quickly leads to yawns. Traditionally, Mona Lisa aficionados have in the same bland way burdened the great painting with an unimaginatively parroted enigma: what is she smiling about or who is she smiling at?>>>