Mira Nair Quotes
Either you're this, or you're that: either you're - if you're a Pakistani, you're a terrorist; if you're an American, you might be a militarist. Those kind of prisms that we see each other through are really stultifying, and they don't often show the complexity and the incredible warmth and encompassing of the world.
Nair, Mira. "Filmmaker Mira Nair On 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist'." Interview by Neal Conan. Talk of the Nation, NPR, 1 May 2013.
He was one of the first democratic politicians of Germany who argued for rapprochement between France and Germany and may have been the first to suggest a European Union. Most of the world was very distrustful of German nationalism, and Stresemann presented one of the positive aspects of it. He died of a stroke in 1929 and the political vacuum was eventually filled by Hitler and the Nazis as the Weimar Republic was short lived. As democratic as Stresemann was, he still was preoccupied with German territorial control. See {620664}.
The inscrutability of the “oriental” was not racial as Nicholson and many others thought as most Asians who became Westernized tend to behave and respond to the Western culture in which they were brought up. However, many of the “oriental” cultures place a premium on inscrutability and avoidance of candor. Therefore, often they interact with Westerners and are unsure of the certainty of what they hear and observe. Or they hear it in ways that in their culture would not indicate strong feeling when that was intended by the Westerner. For example, Arab oratory tends to repeat something intensely felt several if not many times. A Western Diplomat who thinks he “makes himself clear” might slow down and emphasize each word distinctly—a sign of strong emphasis in Western oratory—but if only stated once or twice might not be taken as seriously meant. So communicating between cultures has often caused difficulties which people have assumed were racial characteristics but were cultural.
Mira Nair is an Indian-American filmmaker based in New York City. Her production company, Mirabai Films, specializes in films for international audiences on Indian society, whether in the economic, social or cultural spheres. Among her best known films are Mississippi Masala, Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, The Namesake, the Golden Lion winning Monsoon Wedding, and Salaam Bombay!, which received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language.
