Month: September 2017

This is the Top Five Countdown! We’re detonating the five most popular songs in the Billboard Hot 100 Pop Singles chart, for the week ending Sept. 23, 2017.

Sometimes the Top Five can lull you to sleep with its slowness … and then there are weeks like this.

Number 5: Logic Featuring Alessia Cara & Khalid “1-800-273-8255”

It all starts in fifth place, where we welcome newcomer Logic, who surges four slots to fifth place with “1-800-273-8255” featuring Alessia Cara and Khalid.

What’s with that song title? 

Logic hails from Gaithersburg, Maryland, not far from Washington, D.C. The song title is the telephone number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Logic says the inspiration for this song came on a recent tour, when he stayed in fans’ homes. Logic says some told him his music helped save their lives … which showed him his power as an artist.

Number 4: Taylor Swift “Ready for It?”

No artist is more aware of her own power than our fourth-place newcomer. Taylor Swift is back, and she came to play with “Ready For It?”

Taylor maintained a low profile for much of the past year, then last month re-emerged in a burst of activity on social media. Her sixth album “Reputation” arrives on November 10.

“Ready For It?” features songwriting and production from the solid-gold team of Max Martin and Shellback. It appeared on September 3, immediately becoming Taylor’s 13th number one single on the Billboard Digital Songs chart.

Number 3: Luis Fonsi & Daddy Yankee Featuring Justin Bieber “Despacito”

Ms. Swift isn’t finished with us yet, but right now let’s bring on Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee and Justin Bieber: “Despacito” backs off a notch to number three.

On September 16, Luis gave a special private performance in San Antonio, Texas. He stopped by the Children’s Rehabilitation Institute of TeleTon USA. He sang for the young patients, who battle musculoskeletal and neurological disorders.

Number 2: Cari B “Bodak Yellow (Money Moves)”

Cardi B gets serious this week, as “Bodak Yellow” moves into the runner-up slot.

The Bronx rapper was previously on track to drop her debut album in October, but now says she may need a bit more time to finish it.

Number 1: Taylor Swift “Look What You Made Me Do”

November 10 is the day Taylor Swift delivers her “Reputation” album, and the lead single remains atop the Hot 100. Ruling the roost for a second week: “Look What You Made Me Do.”

This marks the first time in nearly three years that two solo women control the Hot 100. It last happened in December 2014: Taylor Swift was again in the driver’s seat with “Blank Space,” while Meghan Trainor was the runner-up with “All About That Bass.”

We’re all about those hits, and we’ll have more for you next week — so join us if you can.

 
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More than 150 pieces of art made by refugees from Greece are part of the collection at Love Without Borders – For Refugees’ art show in Washington D.C. Many of the pieces sold are from children, as young as three years old.
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Britain’s division of the Indian subcontinent into two countries 70 years ago led to the largest mass migration in modern history, with more than 12 million people displaced and more than half a million killed.

The traumatic legacy of the birth of India and Pakistan is the focus of a new museum that opened in Amritsar in Punjab, the northern state that witnessed the worst frenzy of violence after its western portions went to Pakistan and the eastern ones to India in 1947.

This violent chapter of history had been almost forgotten, said Mallika Ahluwalia, co-founder of the Partition Museum.

​Telling their stories

Although fiction and cinema have reflected that troubled time, there was until now no memorial or museum to millions of people caught in partition.

“We found that so many people we talked to say to us that finally someone is hearing their story. For a long time there was no space, either metaphorical or physical, where their story could be told,” Ahluwalia said.

An initiative of the Arts and Cultural Heritage Trust, the museum opened in Amritsar’s restored, British-era Town Hall.

Exhibiting ordinary items that people carried as they fled, as well as photos, newspaper clippings and audio recordings, the museum recreates the time when slaughtering mobs and bloody riots ravaged both sides of the newly created border.

The exhibits tell tales of ruined homes, lives shattered and rebuilt, loved ones lost and found as tens of thousands of Sikhs and Hindus crossed to India and Muslims to Pakistan. They crammed into overcrowded trains, trucks or even crossed rivers clutching whatever they could salvage.

Some displays depict the functional and mundane, such as a sewing machine and boxes. Many had emotional value. A woman carried her wedding sari. A heavy embroidered jacket and a briefcase belonged to a woman and her fiancé, who were separated amid the looting and carnage, but were happily reunited at a refugee camp. A woman has donated a box that as an 8-year-old girl, she pulled out of the rubble of a house hoping to put into it new dolls to replace the ones she left behind.

Violence bore by women

In a section devoted to women, who largely bore the brunt of the violence, the central exhibit is a water well, a tribute to thousands who either jumped into wells or were pushed by their families to keep them from being raped or abducted.

But an embroidered fabric strung on the well exemplifies the many instances of humanity found amid the carnage. 

“That phulkari (embroidered fabric) belonged to a woman who jumped into the well along with all her family members when they were attacked, but she was rescued. She was rescued by someone from another community,” Ahluwalia said.

A jute cot, carried by a family, symbolizes the endless stream of refugees, including tens of thousands of affluent families, that huddled in sprawling camps.

​Cherished possession

One of them is Jagat Singh, now 90, who traveled from the neighboring city of Jullundur to Amritsar to relate his story.

He escaped the massacre in his village by crossing the Ravi River on a boat when he was a 19-year-old student. Singh still struggles to understand how the harmony between Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, who lived together in neighboring villages and towns, deteriorated into horrific bloodshed.

“In my hostel, we had friendly and affectionate relations with Muslim students. We used to visit each other’s homes. I don’t know why this turned into violence,” he said.

He has donated his most cherished possession — the documents of an $8 student loan that enabled him to graduate and rebuild his life after he arrived as a penniless refugee.

From stories, understanding

Such stories are helping visitors, especially those of younger generations, understand that it was not just leaders of the freedom struggle from British rule, but also countless ordinary people who paid a heavy price for independence.

Praniti, a law student, said the museum left a deep impression on her. 

“It makes me feel so free and so privileged and so aware of how unaware I was,” she said.

It was not just people who were victims. Objects in museums in Punjab also had to be divided between both nations, Ahluwalia said. She points to a necklace dating back to an ancient civilization that had to be split.

“We have come across files which have said half of the beads need to go to Pakistan and half to India. Our entire history in a sense they were trying to divide it in a way that is sad — how do you divide a shared heritage?” she asked.

The answer to that question still eludes the South Asian nations that, 70 years on, remain bitter rivals. But even as the scars of partition continue to fester, for many, the exhibit keeps the hope of reconciliation alive.
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On April 15, 2013, two homemade bombs exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Three people were killed and more than 260 injured, including Jeff Bauman, who lost both his legs. Hours later, when he awoke from surgery, Bauman helped identify one of the terrorists. Now, the film Stronger, based on Bauman’s memoir by the same name, recounts how that terrorist attack changed Bauman’s life and for the better. Jake Gyllenhaal portrays Bauman; they spoke to VOA’s Penelope Poulou.
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An elderly woman seeks a romance with her swimming coach in the Hindi film Lipstick Under My Burqa, which battled the Indian censors ahead of its release in theaters last month and is now going strong on streaming service Amazon Prime.

In another Bollywood film this year, Anaarkali of Aarah, inspired by a true story, a dancing girl who sings innuendo-laden songs at functions in a small town called Aarah takes on a powerful official who molests her in public.

A fresh crop of Hindi films — or Bollywood, as the industry is popularly known — are telling stories of ordinary women seeking sexual and financial freedom.

“Bollywood is a male-dominated industry, but there is a sudden influx of women-oriented films that are also doing well,” Avinash Das, writer-director of Anaarkali of Aarah, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Triggering the change in Bollywood’s narrative was the brutal gang rape of a 23-year-old woman on a bus in New Delhi in 2012, which led to massive protests across the country and put a spotlight on women’s safety in India.

Bollywood films, often characterized by their song and dance sequences and male-dominated story lines, are influential in India and beyond, and objectification of women and their use in titillating songs is often blamed for stoking sexual crime in the country.

India has only 10 cinema screens per million people, compared with 124 in the United States and 90 in China for the nearly 1,000 films Bollywood churns out every year, but it has the largest number of people going to the cinema.

The films that tell women’s stories, though still perceived as commercially unviable, have done well at the box office.

Alankrita Shrivastava, director of Lipstick Under My Burqa, said viewers were drawn to her film as “an honest story about them” and that the film remains the most watched since Amazon Prime’s launch in India last December.

The makers of Anaarkali too could prove naysayers wrong when the film did commercially well, and even a movie exploring lack of sanitation as a women’s rights violation — Toilet: A Love Story — has been a major hit this year.

“When issues matter to people … they are bound to come into popular entertainment media,” said veteran filmmaker Shyam Benegal, whose award-winning films explored India’s caste divide and told stories of ordinary women. “Films like Toilet: A Love Story ring a bell with a large section of the audience who identity with the problem, and that explains why they are doing well.”

Off-screen voices

In April, popular actor Abhay Deol took on fellow actors for endorsing skin-whitening creams and slammed the popular Indian belief of “fairer is better” as racist.

This off-screen voice of leading actors is creating awareness on subjects that were never discussed, be it fairness creams or even sex trafficking, campaigners said.

“Celebrities have a huge following and the message goes out to people that campaigners would never be able to reach out to,” said Samarth Pathak, spokesman at U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

Pathak interviewed Bollywood heartthrob John Abraham on World Day Against Trafficking in July, when he described trafficking as a “serious threat to humanity.”

“This was our first interview with a film star, and it created quite a buzz. A lot of young people are reaching out [to understand] trafficking, which is unprecedented,” Pathak said.

A couple of days before the interview, Bollywood’s most sought-after actor, Akshay Kumar, who plays the male lead in Toilet and is now working in a film on menstrual hygiene, spoke at an international sex trafficking conference in Mumbai about the need to protect children from abuse.

These star voices matter as Bollywood’s handling of prostitution had been restricted to portraying women as “call girls” without delving into the problems of sex trafficking and modern-day slavery, said Sanjay Macwan, regional director of the anti-trafficking charity International Justice Mission.

“When Bollywood celebrities speak against sex trafficking, exploitation and bonded labor, it brings the issue before every Indian,” Macwan said.

‘Fashionable again’

Last year’s release, Dangal, which shows an aging father train his two daughters to become wrestlers, defying social norms in conservative Haryana state in northern India, is among Bollywood’s biggest hits, beating fluffy romances and epic revenge dramas in box office collections.

While arthouse films in the 1980s and a crop of independent filmmakers have tackled social issues, gender and small-town India in their films, the backing of such projects by major studios seems a recent phenomenon — but in some ways is simply following an old Bollywood tradition.

“Hindi cinema has been dealing with social issues since the 1920s, even in the silent era,” Meenakshi Shedde, South Asia consultant to the Berlin and Dubai film festivals and festival curator, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

A 1937 film, Duniya Na Mane (The World Does Not Agree), showed a young schoolteacher from a poor family refusing to consummate her marriage with an old man.

Some of India’s most successful filmmakers from the 1930s to ’60s such as V Shantaram and Bimal Roy had social themes at the center of their stories.

“Bollywood is often perceived as monolithic, masala films with stars, six songs and a happy ending. But it is many different things,” Shedde said. It is wonderful that social issues are becoming fashionable in Bollywood again.”
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The new Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa is, in a word, ambitious.

 The museum opens its doors Friday, Sept. 22, 2017. The building is itself a work of art, a century-old grain silo on Cape Town’s historic waterfront that has been slickly overhauled by star British architect Thomas Heatherwick to house the continent’s largest collection of contemporary art — in the case of this museum, all of it made after the year 2000.

The nine-floor museum strives to show that African contemporary art — so long overlooked on the international stage — is worthy of appreciation and attention. It attempts to thrill visitors with its array of exhibits. Some are inventive, some confrontational, some whimsical, and some, puzzling.

But, says curator Mark Coetzee, the museum’s true ambitions are grander still.

“I think the first and foremost gesture of the museum is a political one,” he told VOA. “And that is to say that for a very long time, the narrative of Africa and the representation of Africans has been defined by others, by outsiders. And the museum’s motivation is to say, let’s create an institution where people from Africa, whether we were born here thousands of years or whether we immigrated yesterday, can contribute to the writing of our own history. Let us also define how we want to be represented to the world.”

He says their work gives rise to many pressing issues in the modern world.

“What contemporary art museums do is, basically, they give us the tools to be able to negotiate the time that we are living in,” Coetzee said. “So, artists ask very difficult, complex questions of society: ‘Why is there separation of wealth and power? Why does the ability to represent culture or represent people rely on a few people’s input and  and not a holistic group of people? How do we negotiate difference in society when we have different religions, or different genders, or different orientations?’

“And so what a museum does is, it’s a very safe space to discuss very difficult issues which impact all of us in the 21st century.”

Dragons, Zebras and Cows

But, Coetzee says, if you’re not inclined toward deep thought, the art is pretty cool too. The museum houses the private collection of Jochen Zeitz, a German art collector and philanthropist, and former CEO of athletics brand Puma.

Visitors will be greeted by a massive dragon, made of bicycle inner tubes, with a 100-meter-long tail, the work of South African artist Nicholas Hlobo. They’ll be dazzled by the whimsical, eye-searingly bright images of zebras and balloons and richly costumed figures, composed by South African photographer Athi-Patra Ruga.

They will be dragged into the undertow of “Ten Thousand Waves” — a video exhibition by of British installation artist Isaac Julien that assaults the senses on nine screens. They’ll be able to touch — and take home — prints of the stark, bold images of Angolan photographer Edson Chagas. And they’ll be haunted by room after room of ghostly cow hides, plastered into ethereal shapes by Swaziland’s Nandipha Mntambo.

Time for African Art

What visitors will not be able to do — at least not on opening weekend — is linger. That’s because when the museum offered 24,000 free passes for two-hour blocks during the grand opening, they were snapped up in just nine minutes.

In the last few years, African contemporary art has started to receive its due, says Hannah O’Leary, head of modern and contemporary African art for international auction house Sotheby’s. While the market is still new, she says, and African artists have yet to command top dollar price, the auction house’s first auction earlier this year brought in $3.8 million (2.8 million pounds).

In doing do, it broke multiple records, including the highest sales in a single auction of contemporary African art. While South Africa has always had a vibrant art scene, she says other African countries are on the rise — both in making art, and in consuming it.

“From the results of our first sale, we had buyers from 29 different countries, in six different continents,” she told VOA, from London. “And that’s really very significant. We’re not talking about just selling South African art to South African buyers. We are taking the greatest art from across the continent and we know that that has an international appeal, so we are are selling to collectors in Africa , but also in North America and Europe. Anyone who is a collector and can appreciate great contemporary art should also be looking at Africa.”

Coetzee says visitors should not be intimidated, though, by the museum’s $38-million renovation, its untold millions of dollars worth of art, or its elegant exterior. Nor, he says, should they be scared away by the $13 ticket — citizens of African nations get free admission every Wednesday, and children’s passes are always free. That’s because, he says, art is something everyone needs.

“The thing that separates us from animals, the thing that makes us unique is our identity. It’s the pride in who we are. And I think that if you remove cultural representation, and say it’s not a basic need, where does that leave us? What meaning does that give us in life?”

Deep questions, indeed. And one that the museum hopes to provoke — if not to answer — when it opens its doors.
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