Word: bahar
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...begins with a middle-aged professor, Isa (played by the director), and his young girlfriend, Bahar (Ceylan's wife Ebru), at the archaic architecture site of Kas. As he photographs the ruins, she stands on a promontory, gazes at the view and cries. The camera holds on her for agonizing minutes, until a fly alights on her hair. Maxi-minimalism! The two are trudging toward a breakup. At dinner with friends, they quarrel publicly. "Don't worry," Bahar says of her hosts, "they enjoy seeing us miserable." (A remark that puts the relationship of critics to minimalist movie characters...
...even though Bangladeshis have long grumbled about the daily bribes they have to pay, an etiquette of corruption, honored by extortionists and victims alike, has made life bearable for many years. Mahafuzur Rahaman Bahar, a member of the Bangladesh Truck Drivers' Union, says drivers once operated according to a "token" scheme. By paying a fixed sum to the first extortionist they encountered, they received a colored-paper token imprinted with the sign of a tree or a cow, which guaranteed free passage to their destination. So long as corruption operated within the defined rules of a scheme, Bangladeshis got along...
...that on average a truck on its way from Dhaka to the port city of Chittagong, the country's most important commercial route, is stopped 8-12 times by extortionists. Trucks are frequently hijacked at night, and drivers who attempt to fight off the hijackers are sometimes shot. Bahar says 35 drivers were killed last year by extortionists: "There's complete insecurity on the roads nowadays...
...Osama Bahar did not wear a beard. He was a devout Muslim--probably more so than his seven siblings, says his father Muhammed--but not a fundamentalist. He played soccer and took karate lessons, and unlike many young Palestinians, he had a job (at $450 a month), as a bank guard. Yet two Saturdays ago, after a Ramadan breaking-of-the-fast dinner with his family in the town of Abu Dis and prayer at the mosque across the street, Osama, 25, found his way to the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall in downtown Jerusalem and blew himself up. Seconds later...
...generation of young men has its own battle scars to avenge. A friend named Hassan offers that while Osama Bahar was in prison, Israeli interrogators hung him by his arms from the ceiling, spat in his face and mocked Islam. (Israeli authorities had no comment.) Says Hassan: "He always said he would avenge the mistreatment." In the case of grudges like that, a beard is optional...