Word: mehtas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Earth, the second film in director Deepa Mehta's prospective trilogy Fire, Earth and Water, tells the tragic story of the 1947 partition of India as witnessed by Lenny Sethna (Maia Sethna), an 8 year-old Parsee girl. Based on Bapsi Sidwha's novel Cracking India, Earth explores the controversial British partition of India into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan, which caused inter-religious massacres by the same Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims who had lived together peacefully for many years. Lahore, the city in which Lenny lives, was the site of a particularly bloody confrontation reflective of the widespread atrocities...
...Mehta, an Indian-born Canadian director, has yet again challenged India's political conservatives. Unlike Fire, which directly criticizes India's societal hypocrisy, Earth shifts a fair amount of the blame onto the ignorance of the paternalistic British imperialists, who ended up causing one of the 20th century's bloodiest ethnic wars in their attempt to control the fate of the Indian people and their government. Before the partition takes place, Lenny, despite being forced by polio to wear a leg brace, enjoys a happy childhood playing under the care of her nanny Shanta (Nandita Das). Shanta is a beautiful...
...Some critics have compared Earth unfavorably to Mehta's Fire, claiming that Earth is no more than a heavy-handed sermon and history lesson. While Fire may be a more brilliantly produced film, dismissing Earth as irrelevant would be an egregious error. A moving depiction of nationalism gone horribly wrong, Earth is richly filmed and extremely well-acted, a film worth seeing by anyone who enjoys a well-written, heart-wrenchingly beautiful story of lost innocence and passionate love destroyed by ignorance and fear. The recent confrontation between India and Pakistan involving nuclear weapons shows the continuing relevance...
...with those held by Harvard. As we leave Harvard and go our separate ways, we need to remember that Harvard's ethos is only one among many, and that lifelong happiness will only come when each of us finds a place with an ethos we can share. Jal D. Mehta'99, a social studies concentrator in Eliot House, was executive editor of The Crimson...
Other professors who were personally approached included Pratap B. Mehta, associate professor of government and of social studies, and Patricia Sullivan, visiting lecturer on Afro-American Studies...