Re: Full Movie 1947 (Earth) 720p
Harriet Wehrenberg
England, having colonized India at its leisure, granted it independence with unseemly haste. Even its most outspoken nationalists were taken aback when Lord Mountbatten, the British viceroy, unexpectedly announced that the date for independence was a few months, not a few years, in the future. The British decision to pull out by Aug. 15, 1947, left a country with no orderly way to deal with the rivalries between Hindus and Muslims, and the partition of India and Pakistan along religious lines led to bloodshed, massacres and, as this film calls it, "the largest and most terrible exchange of population in history." "Earth" is a film that sees that tragedy through the eyes of a group of friends in Lahore, then in India, now in Pakistan. There are Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Parsees, even a Christian or two. They have lived side-by-side since time immemorial, and the more idealistic think that situation can continue. But as India has proven, along with Northern Ireland, the Middle East and Yugoslavia, many members of all faiths consider it no sin to murder a non-believer.
The film is told as a melodrama and romance, not docudrama, and that makes it all the more effective. It sees much of the action through the eyes of a little brace-legged Parsee girl named Lenny, whose beautiful Hindu nanny, or "ayah," is admired by all the men in a circle of friends. The ayah is Shanta (Nandita Das), with glowing eyes and a warm smile. She slowly comes to love Hasan, a masseur (Rahul Khanna), who is Muslim. She likes, but does not love, Dil, known as "Ice Candy Man" and played by the Indian star Aamir Khan. Her life is pleasant in a wealthy Parsee household ruled by Lenny's kind mother and officious father.
The friends meet in a nearby park, for talk that sometimes turns political. They all agree that they are above hatreds based on religion. The little girl looks and listens. Often she is present when Hasan courts the shy Shanta, and even watches as they share their first bashful kiss--just before the screen turns black and ominous music introduces shots of Hindu refugees trekking from the new Pakistan to India, and Muslims making the opposite journey.
It is hard for us to imagine the upheaval and suffering unleashed when the British washed their hands of the jewel in their crown. Imagine a United States in which those with a last name beginning with a vowel had to leave their homes and belongings and trek north, while those with a consonant had to leave everything behind and trek south. Now add bloodthirsty mobs of zealots on all sides.
The film is based on the novel Cracking India, by Bapsi Sidhwa. It is said to be partly autobiographical. She remembers the last moments of harmony among the groups, in particular a day spend on rooftops flying brightly colored kites. A few weeks later, from the same rooftops, some of the same people watch Hindu tenements in flames (the "firemen" spray gasoline on them) and a Muslim man torn in two by a mob that ties his arms to two automobiles. At home, little Lenny and her brother tear her favorite doll in two, and the ayah tearfully tries to stitch it back together.
The closing scenes must have been repeated a thousand times over, as a mob tries to find a hidden person of the wrong religion, and good-hearted people try to offer protection. There is a kind of inevitable logic involved in the way a child would view such a situation and cause harm while trying to help. This is the kind of film that makes you question any religion that does not have as a basic tenet the tolerance of other religions. If God allows men to worship him in many forms, who are we to kill them in his name? "Earth" was written and directed by Deepa Mehta, a Canadian whose previous film, "Fire" (1997), was the first serious Indian film to deal with lesbianism. After sex and Partition, she plans to move on to "Water," about "what happens when Hinduism comes in direct conflict with conscience." In a society still touchy about these subjects, she is nothing if not courageous. (Although the Sidhwa novel won the top literary award in Pakistan, "Earth" has been banned there; in India, censors cut out the gentle, sweet sex scene and made five other cuts.) The fact is, many Americans do not know India and Pakistan were once one country, and few could provide an explanation of Partition. "Earth" is effective because it doesn't require much history from its viewers, explains what needs to be known, and has a universal message, which is that when a mob forms in the name of a religion, its first casualty is usually the teaching of the religion.
Older Lenny: I was eight years old, living in Lahore in March of 1947, when the British Empire in lndia started to collapse. Along with talks of lndia's independence from Britain came rumblings about its division into two countries, Pakistan and lndia. Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs who had lived together as one entity for centuries. suddenly started to clamor for pieces of lndia for themselves. The arbitrary line of division the British would draw to carve up lndia in August of 1947 would scar the Subcontinent forever.
In the wake of World War II, the U.S. Naval ResearchLaboratory began experimenting with German-designed V-2 rockets as wellas smaller, lighter launch vehicles called "sounding rockets." In orderto monitor which way the rockets were pointing during their flights,scientists began putting aircraft gun cameras on them. During one of theseflights, on March 7, 1947, the first space-based picture of Earth was taken at analtitude of 100 miles over New Mexico. In 1950, upondeveloping the film after another of these flights, scientist Otto Bergdiscovered a series of pictures of a huge tropical storm overBrownsville, Texas. He pieced the pictures together into a mosaic of the regionenveloped by the storm, thus demonstrating the potential for space-based camerasto help us monitor our changing world.Interest quickly grew among the international community of Earthscientists in using sounding rockets to study the Earth's upperatmosphere. In 1952, the International Council of Scientific Unionsproposed declaring 1957 the "International Geophysical Year" (IGY) tosatisfy a growing desire among the science community to expand the studyof our home planet to include the whole Earth system and itssurroundings. In 1954, the IGY committee challenged participatingcountries to launch a satellite as part of the IGY activities. On July29, 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower announced that the United Stateswould launch about six Earth satellites as a contribution to the IGY. On the following day, Premier Nikita Kruschev said the Soviet Unionwould also launch satellites during the IGY and the race was on betweenthe superpowers.In October 1957, the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik Ia22-inch spherical satellite weighing 175 poundsinto a low Earth orbit. In January 1958, the United States successfully launched Explorer I,followed by the launch of Vanguard I two months after that. But theRussians' success and the United States' initial failures spread a senseof crisis in the latter country. The Americans declared spaceexploration a national priority, and in 1958 President Eisenhower askedhis Science Advisory Committee to write a policy on space. Later thatyear Congress signed the act creating the National Aeronautics and SpaceAdministration (NASA). Since then, NASA has played an internationalleadership role in developing and deploying satellite technologies forEarth observation.next: A Space-based Perspective
Space-based Observations of the EarthIntroduction
A Space-based Perspective
Earth is a Dynamic Planet
From Observing to Measuring Changes on Earth
Towards Predicting Climate Change
ConclusionLeft: This photo was taken by an automatic K-12 camera, using black andwhite infrared film, from a Viking sounding rocket that reached a height of 227km (141 miles). The film was recovered from the crashed vehicle after it fellback to Earth. The scene viewed here extends southwestward across parts of NewMexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, and northwest Mexico (upper Gulf ofCalifornia on the left). Remote Sensing
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Will Steffen was a driving force in Earth-system science as it emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, bringing together disparate fields such as ecology, biology, oceanography and climate science. He was an influential mentor and a passionate public advocate of science-based climate-change policy, speaking truth to power in his adopted home of Australia and worldwide. He has died, aged 75.
Steffen was born in Norfolk, Nebraska, in 1947. Having trained in chemical engineering at what was then the University of Missouri in Rolla and in chemistry at the University of Florida in Gainesville, he emigrated to Australia in the late 1970s to take up a postdoctoral fellowship in X-ray crystallography at the Australian National University in Canberra. He later moved to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), also in Canberra, to work in science management, editing and communication.
Steffen frequently acted as an expert witness in court cases seeking to limit new fossil-fuel developments. In 2022, his evidence helped to block a proposed opencast coal mine in the Galilee Basin in Queensland on the grounds of unacceptable impacts on climate change and human rights, including those of children and First Nations peoples.
Will Steffen epitomized the ethos of a social contract between scientist and society in his pursuit and sharing of knowledge relevant to the grand challenge of climate change. His visionary academic publications represent a track record of which any scientist would be proud, but his even greater legacy is the thousands of people he educated and inspired to work for a better future.
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