Bonda girl in Orissa. Image by: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0/Flickr/Otabi kitahachi (via HuffPo)

Well, at least some Indians are... a few weeks ago, I confessed up to thinking as a kid that Indians were Black. And a few of my Indian/Bangladeshi friends gave me e-props for it (what up?!). One of them, Wafi, passed on this HuffPo article by Rita Banerji from 2015 that goes into fascinating detail about how there is indeed a strong genetic link between Indians and Africa:

 Growing up in India, I never met or heard about Indians with African lineages. Then in 2005 I watched a dance performance by the Sidi Goma, a group of musicians from the African Indian community, the Siddi, and I was astonished and mesmerised. Since then I've discovered that India's African roots are much older than the Siddis, and are not only evident in numerous other communities, but percolate through direct descent in the blood of at least 600 million Indians.

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(Madame Sul-Te-Wan, Image Source: BlackPast.org)

And no, I absolutely do NOT mean last year's controversial Nate Parker flick, "The Birth of a Nation". I'm talking the D.W. Griffith, 1915 film that celebrates the supposed end of the "treachery" that was Reconstruction and the birth of the Ku Klux Klan. From Wikipedia:

The Birth of a Nation (originally called The Clansman) is a 1915 American silent epic drama film directed and co-produced by D. W. Griffith and starring Lillian Gish. The screenplay is adapted from the novel and play The Clansman, both by Thomas Dixon Jr. Griffith co-wrote the screenplay (with Frank E. Woods), and co-produced the film (with Harry Aitken). It was released on February 8, 1915.

 

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(Image and Caption from "The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones & The Peoples Temple")

I just finished "The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones & The Peoples Temple" by Jeff Guinn and, really, I'm not trying to sound cliched or hackneyed here, but the book is stomach-churning, frightening and by it's end, downright disturbing. This is actually a compliment to Guinn; he vividly captures the horror of the story of Jonestown and the turbulent societal years that led up to it.

Speaking of hackneyed, despite occurring a few years before my birth, I was quite familiar with the Jonestown Massacre. At least, I thought I was. Much like my experience of watching the OJ Simpson documentary "Made in America" last year, what I "kind-of-sort-of-pick-up-from-pop-culture" is most definitely not the same as learning the actual facts of a case. Below are some facts that surprised me most:

Yup, we're weird. Maybe even Carrie just before getting that bucket of pig's blood dumped on her-type weird. Or maybe the after. Most definitely after if you're Pentecostal. (Sissy Spacek in "Carrie". Image Source: Memorable TV)

A few chapters into Rachel Held Evans' 2015 book "Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church", this passage just jumped out at me this morning:

Death and resurrection. It’s the impossibility around which every other impossibility of the Christian faith orbits. Baptism declares that God is in the business of bringing dead things back to life, so if you want in on God’s business, you better prepare to follow God to all the rock-bottom, scorched-earth, dead-on-arrival corners of this world— including those in your own heart— because that’s where God works, that’s where God gardens. Baptism reminds us that there’s no ladder to holiness to climb, no self-improvement plan to follow. It’s just death and resurrection, over and over again, day after day, as God reaches down into our deepest graves and with the same power that raised Jesus from the dead wrests us from our pride, our apathy, our fear, our prejudice, our anger, our hurt, and our despair. Most days I don’t know which is harder for me to believe: that God reanimated the brain functions of a man three days dead, or that God can bring back to life all the beautiful things we have killed. Both seem pretty unlikely to me.

 

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Mary Astor. Image via Public Domain.

"Extortion turns a wise person into a fool, and a bribe corrupts the heart."

- Ecclesiastes 7:7

Happy New Year, Dear Readers. I hope your holidays were full of good food, laughter and love.

After tweeting a link to my last post with a mention of "Boardwalk Empire" actress and singer Margot Bingham, I got a shock days later when she actually responded:

Norma Shearer (Source)

Hello, All. I feel like the last couple of weeks have been a blur. My dad is still in the hospital with pneumonia, but it looks like the antibiotics are working, and is slowly recovering. I went to see him on Monday, and it was hard. Wracked with fever, and unstable blood pressure rates, he didn't even know I was sitting next to him. At a loss for words, I cried. I tried to pray but couldn't. Finally, I said the "Our Father". It was the first prayer he taught Joe, Jos and me. Praying to Heavenly Father for my earthly one.

(Screenshot, "Boss") 

"I wonder what it's like to take the shape of the space you're in?" -Tom Kane, "Boss"

I've never been into astrology.

Not just because I was raised that in fell into the category of the "occult" and was not to be dabbled in, but because it made very little sense to me. At least the way it was told to me, that your life was predetermined based on your birthdate and what type of moon and stars you were born under. So everyone with the same birthday should have the same exact horoscope, the same personality type, the same predilections in love?