Serendipity

Photo: Newswhip The Oscar awards are a global entertainment staple, rewarding many great actors and film practitioners over the years. A number of Nigerians were just elected into its voting board. What does this development portend for us as Nigerians and for our movie industry? The idea for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences started out as an organization to facilitate smoother working relationships within the American movie industry in the 20s. Curiously, it was to be known as the International Academy but that prefix was dropped by the time the academy was officially incorporated.   In more recent times the awards have been dogged by allegations of being too ‘white’, a fact which the academy itself acknowledged and thereafter pledged an era of greater inclusivity by rendering its voting pool more diverse across not just race but also gender, age and relevance. And so consequently, a number of our own veterans here got drafted into the voting academy, but ...

Image: Melmagazine We’re all familiar with the usage of the word ‘Chivalry’ today and this piece looks at the take on chivalry by some advocates of feminism. I recently read comments attributed to one of my favourite and most inspiring people (in an interview she granted) where she argued for I would describe as a more balanced and gender-neutral inclined substitution for chivalry. I discovered while researching the topic that this particular view has actually been around for a while. My choice of advocate for feminism as opposed to outright ‘feminist’ is deliberate as it represents my current understanding and struggle with what feminism truly means. I have and will always believe that men and women are equal (and this is where I differ with some feminist ideologies), but different. What I hear some, (again permit me) advocates of feminism averring, is the ‘same’ treatment for men and women. Same here should not be confused with equal, they mean different things. I will atte...

Image: Livguard I had barely left my street heading to church one Sunday when my car started to act up. Sparking sounds emanated from the engine; an issue my auto electrician had just assured me was resolved only the day before. It didn’t take long for me to decide that it would be safer to park and investigate the issue further. On the opposite side of the road from where I stopped was a truck driver backing his long container truck into an available parking spot there. Now, this fault is something that had damaged the brain box of my car in the past, (or at least that’s what I was told was responsible) and so I was not willing to take any chances. The day being a Sunday, I wasn’t likely to get a mechanic easily and so I approached the truck guy parked on the other side of the road for some help. Thinking about it now, I’m wondering why I felt he could help; I guess I felt driving a truck implied that he was more technical than the average driver.   As I approached h...

Image: Life hope & truth The evolution of man to what we are today has taken place over numerous civilizations and eras. And when one considers how far we’ve come in today’s technologically advanced world, there’s a sense of achievement or even pride at some of the things that are possible today that were unthinkable just  decades before. And the development continues at an astonishing rate as technology often pioneered by the developed nations spreads to the other parts of the globe. Man also advances socially, this is evident in the eradication of a number of horrific social ills that were perpetrated at different times in our history. Slave trade, the holocaust, ethnic cleansing by different regimes as well as numerous unspeakable exploitative and oppressive acts that have sometimes been brazenly carried out in some quarters while the rest of the world watched. Usually such events are relegated to the dark history of the human race, or so I thought.  Sadly the ...

Image: Madison Just the other day, I was wondering how and in what ways our humanity is shared, if at all it is. As we traverse life, do we do so solely through our own experiences and consciousness or is there a way we are connected to and through the experiences of others. I considered how diverse our lives can be; how different and yet how similar human experiences are. I considered the extremes present in our world, poles of wealth, health, well-being, opportunities, exposure, intellect, understanding, sanity and even consciousness. I thought about how these contrasts don’t always exist in opposite ends of the world, oftentimes they subsist side by side, on different sides of a city or a street, or even within a family.    It made me wonder how much impact our circumstances have on how we experience the world, how we live out our lives. Are the experiences of the elite so far placed from those of the down trodden?  Those of the powerful from the weak? Those o...

Image: Crossed Flagpins I remember the first time Venezuela ever came to my consciousness in a significant way. It was during my teen years, following the Miss World pageants; there had been a lot of winners from South America generally but particularly Venezuela. Venezuela holds the Guinness world record for being the only country to win back to back titles in the Miss Universe pageants in 2008 and 2009. Venezuela also ranks right on top in terms of the number of International beauty pageants it has won. Here is a country that could legitimately lay claim to having the most beautiful women in the world. The former Spanish colony also boasts the largest oil reserves in the world, is a founding member of the global oil cartel, Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and has consistently been one of the world’s foremost oil exporters. I want that to really sink in, ‘largest proven oil reserves’, founding member of OPEC (and why not, it has the largest freaking oil reser...

Image: NY Times Usually when something, be it a product or a system works well, the desired effect of it working well is usually a positive one. My argument which I will attempt to establish here is that there can be a glitch when ‘it’ has become too efficient. Now, after that mildly convoluting intro, let me then unveil this ‘said thing’ in this particular instance as democracy, in particular, the United States’. I’m no historian, but from what I remember about American politics, U.S. democracy has had a pretty good stint thus far; one of the oldest and most efficiently run machines. Even if the argument can be made that some of their current and past policies, both internal and foreign have been less than ideal, only few would question their method of selecting their leaders. The selection process for the most part is a transparent and always keenly contested one; if you take away the mess with the Florida votes during Gore versus Bush and similar cases in her history, American ...