Word: pakistani
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...postimperial earth. For 2 hr. 35 min., Cry Freedom meanders through a meadow of noble sentiments, finding its only drama in the education of a white liberal South African and his escape from that apartheid prison camp. In an hour less, Sammy & Rosie blasts a bomber crew of blacks, Pakistanis, Americans and leftist Brits through a pocked landscape of racial and sexual conflagrations. As a Pakistani gent postcards to the folks back home, "Streets on fire -- wish you were here...
...guests of honor are three odd couples: Sammy (Ayub Khan Din), a Pakistani-born accountant, and his American photographer client Anna (Wendy Gazelle); Rosie (Frances Barber), Sammy's wife, a "downwardly mobile" English social worker, and her beau of the evening Danny (Roland Gift), a young black; and Rafi (Shashi Kapoor), Sammy's father, and his old flame Alice (Claire Bloom), a romantic Englishwoman. Is that all clear? No? Don't worry; these lives are not meant to be sorted out. Like real relationships, they are messy, incendiary, lingering past the pleasure point. Kureishi's women can be doctrinaire...
...here is Rafi, who has come to London to escape his old crimes as a despot in the Pakistani government. If Cry Freedom finds easy outrage nestling with the victims of state torture, Sammy & Rosie is prepared at least to make the deathbed that a genial torturer can lie in. But Rafi gets no more or less sympathy than any other character in this exuberant egalitarian stew of a movie. Once the empire has died, taking with it the old notions of great men who shape destinies and insignificant men who suffer like extras in an antediluvian epic, every motive...
...bother to draw the line through it. Patrols from the two countries skirmished on Siachen in 1982. Since then, Islamabad and New Delhi have decided that vital strategic interests, particularly the control of mountain passes bordering the glacier, are at stake. Today a total of 10,000 Indian and Pakistani troops occupy bases in the area. The high altitude makes it especially hazardous duty for soldiers. Indian officials say as many as 500 Indian troops on the glacier die each year from altitude sickness or in accidents...
Islamabad had no comment about the recent battle until the Indian announcement. Then Rana Naeem Mahmood, Pakistan's Minister of State for Defense, told Parliament that "in consequence of aggressive measures by Indian troops in the Siachen area, serious clashes took place." Indian figures for Pakistani dead were "highly exaggerated," he claimed. Indian and Pakistani officials said last week that a cease-fire seems to be holding. But with winter coming, that may be more a matter of necessity than goodwill...