Word: feudality
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...religious parties seldom grabbed more than five percent of the vote. The country's intelligentsia likes to claim this is because, once all the hollering dies down and ballots are cast, Pakistanis are moderate, secular folk. In fact, most Pakistanis are poor, unschooled people who traditionally vote as their feudal squires command?or suffer their wrath. With the two big parties in retreat, the hard-line religious coalition is leading a whole lot of voters to the booths. Polls indicate that the MMA could win 30 to 50 of the 270 National Assembly seats. (Another 70 seats are reserved...
...best Indian films in Toronto explored the pain of girls growing up: one escaping her awful destiny, another finding her troubled heritage. Buddhadeb Dasgupta's A Tale of a Naughty Girl is set in rural Bengal in 1969, the summer of the moon landing, but the feudal culture it defines could be today's?or that of hundreds of years ago. Lati, a pretty 14-year-old, hopes to slip out of an arranged marriage with an old goat, thinking it the worst of all possible worlds, while village women in the sex trade speak of their jobs with...
...Mugabe is returning the country to a feudal system, just like Pol Pot did in Cambodia," says John Robertson, an economist based in Harare, who predicts that Zimbabwe's economy will shrink 12% this year, which would make it the worst performer in the world. Says U.S. State Department spokesman Philip Reeker: "Mugabe has taken a country that should be prospering, that should be benefiting from its natural resources, including the resources of its own people," and has plunged it "into economic chaos and ruin...
...revelations rocking the Catholic Church. But with even prominent abbots involved in debauchery, there is often little the monk police can do. "They are well-intentioned," he says, "but some of the worst wrongdoers are more powerful than they are." Indeed, reformist monks are severely hampered by an insular, feudal clerical structure. "There's a lot of politics in the temple," says Sanitsuda...
...During these more feudal days, theaters sprang up throughout Japan, and people of all walks of life filed in to see what had caught the Prince Regent's eye. While Western audiences had their favorite silent-screen stars accompanied by music and intertitles, the Japanese stars were not on the screen?but on the stage in front of it. Benshi, or film narrators, had followings of their own; a big-name benshi could pack a house. Throughout the silent era, they mimicked the voices of different characters and provided plot narration to musical accompaniment, in a style familiar from Japan...