Lollywood

Lollywood is pretty much just the Pakistani version of Hollywood. Residing in Lahore, Pakistan, Lollywood used to be an amazing film studio, producing over 200 films per year. Now producing less than 50 films per year, many Pakistanis find Lollywood boring. Back in the 60’s, Lollywood was a master of producing action and romance films, but since then they haven’t changed directions with their movies, and most people find the film industry dry, overplayed and boring. They seem to focus on trying to escape reality in a poverty stricken country, sticking to themes like true love, heroism, and fun. Their is another interesting cultural difference between Lollywood, and our Hollywood. In most movies here, the heroines usually have to be thin to be considered attractive, whereas in Pakistan, bigger is better. 

I chose to research this topic because I had never heard of Lollywood, and I wondered how many -ollywood’s even existed. As it turns out, there’s quite a lot, including a Kabulwood, which makes me wonder why the author of The Kite Runner never mentioned it. Maybe Kabulwood just wasn’t as popular at the time the story was set, I don’t know. But the content in the majority of Lollywood’s movies demonstrates huge cultural differences between the middle east, and the west.

Iqbal, Saadia. “Bollywood Online Extra.” Bollywood Online Extra. N.p., Feb. 2005. Web. 08 May 2016.

Muslims and Mirrors

In The Kite Runner, Amir and Hassan are playing with a mirror and shining it into a neighbors house. Ali notices and has them stop, reminding them that “the devil shone mirrors too, shone them to distract Muslims during prayer”. That made me curious as to whether there was an Islamic superstition against mirrors, like how if you brake a mirror you get seven years of bad luck. As it turns out, the only prohibition against mirrors in Islamic law is to not pray where one is within view, or to cover it up when praying. Simply to keep it from distracting a Muslim in prayer. Other than that, mirrors are actually used as a metaphor and, ironically, as a basis for a prayer, “O Allah, You have beautified my features, so beautify my character as well”, which is supposed to refer to how we use a mirror to help us maintain our physical beauty and how we should look to maintain beauty of character. Overall I feel like this information gives insight to understanding more about Islam than the twisted image that terrorist groups have shown.

Patel, Maulana Yunus, Saheb. “Mirror Reflections.” Hazrat Maulana Yunus Patel Saheb Rahmatullah Alayh. N.p., n.d. Web.

 

Islamic Fortune Telling

Fortune telling is often considered nothing more than a con artists attempt at money, and most often it is. Most fortune tellers just make a calculated predictions based on events that happen to most people. But there are some Islamic fortune tellers that are believed to be able to predict the future with incredible accuracy because it is said that they are in contact with the Jinn and are able to tell the future from them. According to Shariah law, this kind of fortune telling is strictly forbidden, as well as consulting with a fortune teller or astrologist. This because doing so is considered to be associating others with Allah. It is also seen as the actions of a disbeliever.

In The Kite Runner, Hassan and Amir visit a fortune teller who, after reading Hassan’s fortune, returns his coin and says nothing. This drew my interest because I’ve always considered fortune tellers to just be con artists, telling people only what they want to hear, or making predictions based on things that happen to most people. It seemed unusual to me that a conman would give back money that they make, so I decided to try to find out if there was something about middle eastern culture that would make this fortune teller different. I still don’t believe in fortune telling, but I do still find it pretty interesting and this did give me more information on Islamic belief.
Phillips, Abu Ameenah Bilal, Dr. “Multimedia.” Islam and Fortune Telling. N.p., 21 Feb. 2010. Web. 04 Apr. 2016.

Oat Cell Carcinoma

Oat Cell Carcinoma, also known as Small Cell Lung Cancer (SCLC), is a comparatively rare type of lung cancer that only takes up about 10%-15% of lung cancers. It’s highly correlated to smoking with about 98% of cases happening in smokers. Most cases also occur in patients about 60-80 years of age. Oat Cell Carcinoma metastasizes, or spreads, very early in the stages of the disease, spreading to the mediastinal lymph nodes, bones, adrenal glands, liver and brain. Extensive stage SCLC is incurable and only about 2% of patients surviving past 5 years, even when given combination chemotherapy treatment.

I chose this topic to research because I had never heard of this type of cancer before, and when it took Baba’s life in The Kite Runner, I was curious to know more about the disease and what treatments Baba’s doctor suggested. Unfortunately I didn’t find much on treatments, except that a combination of chemotherapy and radiation are typically very effective in the early stages. But it’s always a good to know as much as you can about cancer.

 

Tan, Winston W. “Small Cell Lung Cancer.” Medscape. N.p., n.d. Web.

Muslim Funeral Traditions

Like most religions, Islam demands certain traditions for burying their dead. Before death, the soon to be deceased is encouraged to recite the “shahada”, a prayer confirming that Allah is the only God. Family and close friends of the dying person are to be with them until the die, at which point they are to say: “Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un” meaning “Verily we belong to Allah, and truly to Him shall we return”. Then they close the eyes and mouth of the dead, cover the body with a clean sheet, and give supplication to Allah. The body must be buried as quickly as possible, so funeral plans must be made immediately. That also means that embalming is not typically allowed and most communities prohibit moving the body to another country to be buried. Cremation is also prohibited and autopsies are seen as a desecration of the body, however organ donation is allowed as it follows the teaching “Whosoever saves the life of one person it would be as if he saved the life of all mankind”. To prepare for the funeral, the body is washed at least three times and wrapped with three sheets.  Once the sheets are secured to the body with ropes, it is transported to a Mosque for funeral prayers. The funeral prayers are not actually performed inside the Mosque but in the courtyard, a prayer room, or study room at the mosque. Because of the urgency to bury the body as soon as possible, there is no pre-funeral viewing of the body. After prayers, the body is immediately taken to the cemetery to be buried. In most communities, only men are allowed to attend this part of the funeral. The body is lowered into the grave, facing perpendicular to Mecca, with a prayer and each mourner in attendance places three handfuls of dirt into the grave. A headstone may be placed to mark the grave, however it may not be anything large or to elaborately decorated.

I chose to research this topic because in The Kite Runner, it caught my interest how at Baba’s funeral, Amir had to go to a different location to talk to his wife. I was curious to learn how funerals of the Islamic faith were different than a Christian funeral or I suppose, an average American funeral. This information helps me to understand just a little bit more about the Islamic faith and it’s values.

Works Cited

“Muslim Funeral Traditions.” Everplans. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.

How Music Affects Learning

Why So Violent?

“They would have killed me, thought Montag,… For no reason at all in the world they would have killed me.”

“Psychologists Study Media Violence for Harmful Effects.” American Psychological Association. N.p., Nov. 2013. Web. 10 Feb. 2016.

In this part of the book, a group of teenagers driving a car tried to hit Montag, but swerved to avoid flipping the car when Montag fell flat. It made me think about how the value of life is completely lost on people in Fahrenheit 451. They have become so desensitized to violence that one has to wonder, is murder even still illegal for them? More to the point however, I wonder if we are becoming severely desensitized to violence in our world. According to the APA, American Psychological Association, long years of research have pointed to the theory that violence in our media have led people, especially children, to be more apathetic towards the pain of others, more afraid of the world outside, and more aggressive in their behavior. Other studies in video game violence had similar results, however some psychologists have argued that the lab studies that have thus far been conducted, don’t contain variables such as mental health and family life, which could change the results of their studies. They suggest that these other variables are more likely the cause of aggressive or apathetic behavior, and playing violent video games is a result.

In Fahrenheit 451, the majority of the population has no regard for life, not even their own. They play risky car games, hit people on the street at over 100 miles per hour. Every day more of their people die from recklessness. Recklessness that comes from their complete apathy for the lives around them. They represent what we are to become with the constant, gradual desensitization to the violence we see in the media every day.

There’s No Escaping Karma

“What is there about fire that’s so lovely?…. It’s real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences. A problem gets too burdensome, then into the furnace with it. Now, Montag, you’re a burden. And fire will lift you off my shoulders, clean, quick, sure; nothing to rot later. Antibiotic, aesthetic, practical.”

Vibert, Robert S. “Avoiding Responsibilities in Life.” Avoiding Responsibilities in Life. N.p., Feb. 2006. Web. 09 Feb. 2016.

This quote makes me think about how humans tend to try to avoid responsibility for our actions whenever we do something that isn’t socially acceptable. In accordance with that, Robert Vibert, whoever that guy is, wrote an article proposing that the reason we try to avoid responsibility is because we want to avoid the feeling of shame it might bring us. Now I’m sure that to some extent all of us have known whenever we refuse to take responsibility for what we did, we are doing it to avoid shame. The problem is that unless we take responsibility for our actions and try to correct or make amends for them, they will remain a burden for us to carry. If one tries to run from their problems or tries just cover them up, sooner or later it’s going to catch up to them and make more trouble.

In Fahrenheit 451, Beatty sees fire as his all around scapegoat to deal with any problem he’s confronted with. To him, if fire can destroy any physical evidence that would tie him to anything, he won’t have to deal with it later. But even though no physical problems may present themselves after he burns their source, he might still live with a guilty conscience. There’s reasonable evidence to believe that Beatty has read many books, and that he developed a guilty conscience about reading the books, so he began burning each book he read as soon as he was done with it. But even though he had destroyed the books, there was still that conflict inside of him that eventually drives him to get Montag to kill him. Not even fire presents a viable way to escape responsibility from what you’ve done without making it worse. The only option is to take responsibility, and make a good effort to correct or compensate for your actions.

Semper Fidelis: Always Faithful

“Every hour so many damn things in the sky! How in the hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn’t someone want to talk about it! We’ve started and won two atomic wars since 1990! Is it because we’re having so much fun at home we’ve forgotten the world?”

“Mystery Swirls Around Secret Sniper Taking Out Top ISIS Leaders In Libya.” American Military News. N.p., 29 Jan. 2016. Web. 08 Feb. 2016.

Montag is asking the real questions here. Their society doesn’t even care that they’re on the brink of war. They don’t even question the amount of bombers that fly over their heads every day. At least now even those of us at home care enough to follow the war that we’re in. We follow it so closely that we even take interest in things that we aren’t even responsible for. Like this sniper that killed at least 3 ISIS leaders in under 2 weeks, we don’t know who he is, if he’s alone or if he’s even a he. But we are following the war so closely that stories about this sniper and many other war stories are all over the media. My Facebook feed is so chalk full of current war stories that only took me maybe 2 minutes to find this one. And more and more stories like it pop up every day. Not only are we following the war so closely but we take care for those fighting it for us. It is plenty easy to search the Internet and find dozens of charity organizations that take care of our veterans and send care packages to our soldiers on the front lines. There’s one music video I’ve seen, by Five Finger Death Punch, called The Wrong Side Of Heaven, and at the end they have an extensive list of organizations that give charity to war veterans and soldiers over seas.

This is one of thankfully several differences between our current society and that of Fahrenheit 451. While we pay close attention to the wars we fight in, their society couldn’t care less what happens on the front lines. If it doesn’t affect them directly and immediately then they see no reason why they should care at all. Today when war is declared, the president will address the nation and people will listen and respond, with clear emotion, solemn attitudes. Some even sign up to join the military as soon as war is declared. When war is declared in Fahrenheit 451, they announce it casually over the radio and no one really reacts much, if at all. For us however, we will always support our troops. Semper Fidelis. Not only the Marine Corps motto, but the policy we shall undertake for our soldiers.

Be Smarter Than Your TV

“Mildred kicked at a book. “Books aren’t people. You read and I look all around, but there isn’t anybody!… My ‘family’ is people. They tell me things: I laugh, they laugh! And the colors!…. Why should I read? What for?””

Medlock, Katie. “What Does Watching TV vs. Reading a Good Book Do to Your Brain?” What Does Watching TV vs. Reading a Good Book Do to Your Brain? N.p., 7 Sept. 2015. Web. 07 Feb. 2016.

In Fahrenheit 451, Mildred is extremely addicted to her 3 wall-sized TV’s, to the point that she refers to the people on them as her ‘family’. You don’t need to be a psychologist to know that that is not healthy. Studies today show that while watching TV can increase frontal lobe grey matter, it actually decreases your verbal IQ. Other studies have revealed that reading a novel “increased connectivity in the parts of the brain responsible for language receptivity—so much so that the heightened connectivity was retained days later, much like “muscle memory.””. Additionally, reading was found to reduce stress levels by 68%, because you can get lost in a book and escape from reality, in the kind of way that you just can’t when you watch TV. Books give your brain needed exercise as they force you to actively interpret written words and use your imagination, whereas movies and TV shows do all the imagining for you. That’s part of why you can get so lost in a book and not in a movie.

Mildred is a perfect example of why we should read instead of always plopping our butts down in front of the TV and just turning off our brains. She has gotten to the point that when she tried reading or when Montag read to her, she couldn’t imagine anything for herself and she now relies on the TV to do that for her. It’s really quite sad to think about, and it’s just downright depressing to think that we could be in that same boat some day. I know you’ve probably heard it a thousand times before, but next time you’re about to just sit and watch a movie, think about trading that remote for a book.