Word: buzkashi
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...understand Afghan politics, the theory goes, just go to a game of Buzkashi. After a few hours on a muddy field north of Kabul, watching three dozen men on horseback charge each other to gain possession of a disemboweled calf carcass, the axiom starts to make sense. The game is simple enough: grab the calf from the ground at one end of the field, hoist it over the saddle bow, circle the flag at the opposite end of the field and drop it back in the original chalk circle to score. What makes it difficult is that every other...
Seeing the Red Sox play at Fenway Park is the greatest live sports experience in the world, although I’ve never seen buzkashi or a Balinese cock fight. World Champions, indeed...
...faraway realm rival clans play a brutal game called buzkashi, in which horsemen fight over a dead goat and drag its carcass across a finish line. Badshah Khan (Amitabh Bach-chan), noble chief of his clan, seems destined to win this fierce match, when the veil falls from the face of his main rival and--Allah be praised!--it is a beautiful woman, Benazir (Sridevi). What can our smitten hero do but let Benazir win the race and, to prove his love, lead his warriors in an ecstatic production number...
...policymakers left Afghanistan largely out of their geopolitical calculations, implicitly conceding it to the Soviet sphere of influence. When Henry Kissinger stopped off in Kabul to show the flag for a few hours in 1974, he spent almost as much time watching buzkashi, a primitive and violent form of polo, as he did talking business with President Mohammed Daoud. Says a veteran of the Nixon and Ford Administrations: "We had no illusions that the Afghans would or could defy Moscow. They were more Finlandized than the Finns...
Frankenheimer's technical virtuosity receives ample display, the buzkashi alone is thunderously exciting and imparts a startling sense of participation. But he has tried to do too much. Besides his obsession with courage, he obviously also wanted to say something about greed, honor and duty, but the themes never mesh. Dal ton Trumbo's screenplay and his fake Arabian Nights dialogue do nothing to help. There is much talk of "the coolness of my shop" and characters greet each other with such fulsome salutations as "Peace on you, O master of the stables." Miss Taylor-Young bolts across...