Submitted by by S. Rizvi

Ayad Akhtar wins 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama 

Ayad Akhtar, a son of Pakistani immigrants, wins 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.  Last year, his play “ “Disgraced’’ has a successful run at Lincoln Center in New York. The New York Times Review praised it “a continuously engaging, vitally engaged play about thorny questions of identity and religion in the contemporary world”

“ Mr. Akhtar, a novelist and screenwriter, puts contemporary attitudes toward religion under a microscope, revealing how tenuous self-image can be for people born into one way of being who have embraced another.”

“Disgraced” also drew on a dinner party Mr. Akhtar and his former wife once gave, in which a discussion of Islam created tensions in the room, even among his close friends. “Their perception of me, in some subtle and not-so-subtle ways, shifted over the course of just an evening,” he said.

“The players are a quartet of accomplished New Yorkers of differing races, creeds and, yes, colors, although they have all arrived at the same high plateau of worldly achievement and can agree on the important things, like the tastiness of the fennel and anchovy salad and the banana pudding from Magnolia Bakery. What they cannot agree on — and what will ultimately tear apart at least one of the relationships in the play — is who they really are and what they stand for, once the veneer of civilized achievement has been scraped away to reveal more atavistic urges.”

“( Akhtar) makes no bones about the challenges facing Muslims in America: “My hope is that it’s all balanced in the play but I think there’s a sense of Muslims in the West being besieged by a truculent atmosphere that makes it difficult for them to feel at home. With Disgraced, I’m trying to put a clash on stage that reflects the clash that’s happening within the social body.”

New York Times Review  10/23/2012

http://theater.nytimes.com/2012/10/23/theater/reviews/disgraced-by-ayad-akhtar-with-aasif-mandvi.html?_r=1&

Interview with The Telegraph

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-features/9997972/Interview-with-Ayad-Akhtar-winner-of-the-2013-Pulitzer-Prize-for-Drama.html

Mira Nair’s New Movie “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”

Adapted from Hamid Mohsin’s novel opened in theaters last Friday. Below are excerpts from review by Financial Times.

“The money that brought the film to life came from Saudi Arabia, with later support from Qatar. Hani Farsi, chief executive of his London-based family investment group, the Corniche Group, and the owner of the Bulgari Hotel in Knightsbridge, signed the cheque..”

“Nair had longed to make a film about Pakistan. There were sentimental reasons. Her father, a civil servant in the elite Indian Administrative Service, grew up in Lahore, when Pakistan’s second-largest city was part of northern India before partition in 1947. During her childhood in the southern Indian state of Orissa, she relished her own Punjabi identity, learnt Urdu and adored ghazals, the heart-rending ballads of the north. She long considered Lahore, with its painting, poetry and courtly manners, as a Venice of the east – only now “two guys with guns come along and throw you into the back of a Pajero”.

“I wanted to make a film about contemporary Pakistan and not one riddled by partition and the weight of all that because [as Indians] that is all we see. We don’t see anything that is now.”

More broadly, she wanted to tell a tale of a global conflict from the other side, and took The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film about the Algerian revolution, as inspiration.”

“From Vietnam’s Deer Hunter to Iraq, films are never about the person who has had his house destroyed. I want to tell the other side … It’s really about this duel, this dance.

“At its heart it is a thriller. The colour is all very well but it’s what is going to happen. Is he or isn’t he [a fundamentalist]? That’s an amazing razor to walk on,” she says. “The elegance of the story is that you don’t know what side our hero is on.”

Unlike Hamid’s book, Nair’s softer, homespun optimism wins out. The protagonist’s lover in New York does not fade away with anorexia, depression and suicide. The climax of the book is left darkly to the reader’s imagination; less so in the film, where the hero steps back from violence. Monsoon Terrorist is what Hamid, who worked on the adaptation, dubs the film”

Click to read full review;

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/cd119fda-a699-11e2-95b1-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2RHhCeM5a