Rezwan has an interesting post about the vulgarization of Bangladeshi cinema:
With vulgar titles and sexy posters these movies attract those people with a view to give them some cheap entertainment. Did you ever wonder why the Bengali Cinema actresses keep on gaining their weight? On public demand. For the poor a fatty figure represents wealth and prosperity;
Kind of funny in light of the fact that in most parts of the world actresses try and stay super thin. One of my cousins married a man whose family has had an involvement in the Bengali film industry for decades. His uncle, a director, was shot in the head by the Pakistani security forces in 1971, while much of his extended family had to go into hiding.1 He told me that one of the reasons that Bangladeshi film sucks so badly is so many of the talented people were killed off, which had a cascade effect because it also denied younger people mentors. My cousin-in-law told me, “they killed our brains”. Ah, the fellowship of Islam!
Postscript: My cousin-in-law’s father stayed away from film after independence because of the tragedy it brought to his family, he’s an arms dealer, a far more reliable profession!
Addendum: I just realized, some of my comments above might be illustrative of processes I hinted at in Machiavelli & the Great Men, that is, elite-dominant personalities in several sectors of Bangladeshi/Bengali (Bangladesh was in the process of formation, so the use of the term is an anachronism) society were at a fitness handicap in relation to more humble individuals. One could imagine a small nation that shifts back and forth between the hands of hostile larger neighbors which might be subject to several such anti-dominant selection sweeps (I think Lithuania might be a case of this that would warrent attention).
An acquaintance of mine suggested this sort of process might have been at play during Stalin’s great purges, and wondered at the impact they might have had on the personality/IQ profile of the Soviet population. I was skeptical simply because it seemed to me that the characteristics of the Russian “personality” were crystallized as early as the reign of Ivan the Terrible (or perhaps Peter the Great), that is, the appeal of autocracy and the strong man. There is a strong cultural/social factor that obviously exists over any genetically rooted changes in the population, so we should not get carried away with the latter.
1- My mother was shot by mistake in 1971, though she survived. Her family were apolitical, and as a doctor, my grandfather was small-fry. But, the reality that such violence touched the lives of upper-middle-class Bangladeshi Muslims makes it entirely plausible to me that hundreds of thousands of Hindus, if not millions, were killed during the 1971 conflict. This asymmetrical impact explains I think the relatively sanguine attitude the Bangladeshi government & people take toward Pakistan, the Muslim majority was only mildly brushed by the catastrophe.
Posted by razib at 12:00 PM