الكاتب: kafej

Tim Minchin has paid tribute to his mother, Ros, after announcing her death while performing a show in Australia.

The comedian, musician and singer shared a photograph on Instagram, simply captioned: “So it goes.”

During his show at the State Theatre in Sydney on Friday as part of his latest tour, An Unfunny Evening With Tim Minchin And His Piano, he told the audience his mother had died the previous day, according to local media in Australia.

Minchin told fans ahead of the encore and said he had wanted the show to go on, before performing one of his most popular songs, White Wine In The Sun.

The track includes the lyrics: “I’ll be seeing my dad, My brother and sisters, my gran and my mum, They’ll be drinking white wine in the sun.”

Minchin, who was brought up in Perth, Western Australia, shared stories about his mum during the show, including her diagnosis with terminal blood cancer in 2020, and played a variety of songs he had written about her, Perth Now reported.

He closed the show with a cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, with the audience joining him to sing.

On Monday, as well as his tribute, the star also shared a picture of himself on stage at the State Theatre, saying: “Thank you, Sydney, for a weekend of shows I’ll never forget.”

One of the hundreds of fans who responded to his posts described Friday night’s show as “beautiful”, saying: “None of us will ever forget it. And most of all, much love, strength and support to you and your family at this sad time.

“Your beautiful Mum would be immensely proud of the amazingly talented man she created who was able to touch and connect every single person in that theatre through love, tears and song.”

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Another fan said Minchin’s second show at the venue on Saturday night was the same. “A night we’ll never forget,” they wrote. “Thanks for sharing yourself with us. Our hearts go out to you and your family.”

“Our hearts went out to you when you spoke about your Mum,” another wrote.

Minchin is currently touring Australia, with shows planned across the country before he ends with eight days in Perth in February and March 2024.

Greta Thunberg was interrupted as she addressed a climate protest in Amsterdam on Sunday after inviting a Palestinian and an Afghan woman on stage.

The Swedish activist was speaking to a crowd of tens of thousands in the Dutch capital before the country heads to the polls in a general election next week.

“As a climate justice movement, we have to listen to the voices of those who are being oppressed and those who are fighting for freedom and for justice,” she said.

“Otherwise, there can be no climate justice without international solidarity.”

After the Palestinian and Afghan women had come on stage and spoken, Ms Thunberg resumed her speech.

But a man went on to the stage and told her: “I have come here for a climate demonstration, not a political view,” before he was ushered off.

The man’s identity was not clear. He was wearing a jacket with the name of a group called Water Natuurlijk that has elected members in Dutch water boards.

Ms Thunberg appeared to be wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh, a traditional black and white scarf.

Earlier proceedings had been interrupted as a small group of activists at the front of the crowd waved Palestinian flags and chanted pro-Palestinian slogans.

The interruption did not seem to phase Ms Thunberg, 20, as she was later seen dancing behind the stage as a band played.

The speeches on stage were the culmination of a mass protest that saw tens of thousands of people march through the streets of Amsterdam, urging for more action to tackle climate change.

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Climate change is one of the key policy areas the political parties are fighting over in their election campaigns.

Organisers claimed that 70,000 people took part in the march and called it the biggest climate protest in the Netherlands.

Ms Thunberg was among those walking through the historic heart of the Dutch capital.

Political leaders including former European Union climate chief Frans Timmermans, who now leads a centre-left, two-party bloc in the election campaign, later addressed the crowd in a square behind the landmark Rijksmuseum.

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Event organiser, the Climate Crisis Coalition, said in a statement: “We live in a time of crises, all of which are the result of the political choices that have been made. It has to be done and it can be done differently.”

While the coalition included the Fridays for Future youth movement, protesters were all ages and included a large contingent of medics in white coats carrying a banner emblazoned with the text: “Climate crisis = health crisis.”

“I am a paediatrician. I’m here standing up for the rights of children,” said one of the protesters, Laura Sonneveld. “Children are the first to be affected by climate change.”

“It is time for us to protest about government decisions,” said Margje Weijs, a Spanish teacher and youth coach. “I hope this influences the election.”

The steady churn of dialysis machines. The rhythmic drip-drip of blood from IVs. The low hum of life-support equipment keeping the babies in incubators alive, tubes running in and out of their little bodies.

The routine functioning of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central Gaza Strip lies in sharp contrast to the chaos of weeks of Israeli bombardment, which in recent days has targeted a number of hospitals in the besieged enclave.

But power and water crises due to Israel’s campaign after Hamas’s October 7 attack – which have already shuttered more than half of Gaza’s 35 hospitals – are drastically affecting the central Gaza hospital as well.

Incubator babies and dialysis patients hooked up to machines dependent on fuel are at particular risk – especially as Al-Aqsa is the sole facility for kidney patients in the central Gaza Strip governorate, Khalil al-Dakran, the hospital’s spokesperson, told Al Jazeera’s fact-checking agency Sanad.

“If electricity and water outages persist and fuel depletes, patients will be transferred to mass graves if the aggression continues,” al-Dakran warned.

“And the world [just] watches,” he continued bitterly.

Dialing down dialysis care

The hospital has seen a surge in the number of patients since the start of the latest conflict, with thousands of wounded streaming in and taxing the hospital’s capacity.

In addition, as thousands of displaced people from northern regions of Gaza poured southwards, the number of patients increased, especially those with chronic diseases needing treatment, like dialysis for kidney ailments.

The hospital has had to limit dialysis treatment times from four hours to two-and-a-half hours, while also having to decrease the frequency of patients’ dialysis sessions per week, al-Dakran said.

Patients are terrified, not only of the bombs raining down, but also about whether they will receive the care they need.

“I undergo dialysis three times a week, waiting for hours on crowded roads, terrified,” displaced woman Maryam al-Jayar told Sanad.

“We wait so long, from morning till night, for dialysis. All while the bombing continues. Now I get shorter and less frequent dialysis and on top of that with water and electricity shortages the dialysis process itself is not working right and can cause blood clots,” Nesma Sharir, another kidney patient said.

Infants found under the rubble

Meanwhile, the neonatal intensive care department at Al-Aqsa is also buckling under the pressure of the war.

There, nurse Warda al-Awawda hovers above the incubators, checking on the babies lying inside them.

Al-Awawda and her colleagues say there have been a lot more newborns admitted to the intensive care unit, not only premature infants but also newborns injured by the bombings.

Sometimes the journey the babies have to take to get to the hospital contributes to their deteriorated health, al-Awada told Sanad, pointing out that she has had mothers with their babies – or babies on their own – arrive on all sorts of transport, including donkey carts in some cases.

Some babies are carried into the hospital in the caring but jostling arms of someone who has just rescued them from under the rubble and wants them to get the care they need as fast as possible and there are no stretchers available.

One infant, Hassan Mishmish, arrived at the hospital after being rescued from under the rubble. His parents were found dead.

“He was in the arms of his dead mother, covered in dust,” al-Awawda said.

“All the nursing staff take turns caring for him after he lost his parents.

“His brother is also injured, he’s in the children’s ward, and his grandmother is also injured. There is nobody from his family left to take care of him,” she added, saying there are dozens of other similar cases of babies found under the rubble.”

It is getting harder for the nurses there to take care of the babies, although it is not for lack of trying. The hospital is struggling under serious shortages of essential supplies, including things as basic as the soap needed for hand sanitisation.

New Delhi, India – For years, Pravin Tambe, a leg-spinner from a middle-class family in Mumbai, toiled away in company and club teams with the singular goal of playing first-class cricket.

He kept going, even as he aged and other players began to refer to him as “uncle”.

Then in 2013, at the age of 41, he was discovered and signed by former Indian captain Rahul Dravid to play for a professional franchise cricket team.

In the 2014 edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL), while playing for Rajasthan Royals, Tambe took a hat-trick against Kolkata Knight Riders and was named man of the match. He went to the dressing room and wept.

His story was dramatised in the 2022 Bollywood biopic Kaun Pravin Tambe? (Who is Pravin Tambe?), whose character was played by actor Shreyas Talpade.

When Talpade auditioned for the role, his career was not going well.

“I was told that some people weren’t sure whether I’d be able to pull it off,” Talpade, now 47, told Al Jazeera.

He practised hard to convincingly play the leg-spinner from the ages of 20 to 41. His body ached, and one evening when he was feeling particularly low, Talpade and his wife watched Iqbal, his 2005 Bollywood film.

In Iqbal, Talpade played the fictional lead character, a deaf and mute village boy obsessed with playing cricket for India. Despite Iqbal’s disability, his father’s disapproval and no formal training, he persisted and, as happens in all good sports films, human spirit and grit triumph in the climactic sequence.

“[I watched it] just as a reminder – not only about the story of this guy, but also to myself – that I’ve done this before and I can do it again,” he said.

Talpade triumphed too. He got to play Tamble, and cricket transcended from being just a sport to become – as many Indians say – a “metaphor for life”.

People still come up to Talpade to tell him that when they are “feeling down,” they often watch Iqbal.

“The underdog factor is probably the crux. It’s very high on energy and motivation,” says Talpade.

The story of Indian cricket is the story of India, of Talpades and Iqbals, of men and women struggling with poverty, caste, class and gender discrimination, yet rising from gully cricket to play for the country – which is hosting the 2023 Cricket World Cup.

Bollywood, India’s “dream machine”, has always reflected the mood of the nation by drawing inspiration from real life – including from cricket, although it has had a rocky relationship with the sport.

“Cricket and cinema really are two religions in this country,” says Kabir Khan, one of Bollywood’s top directors whose last film, titled 83, was about India winning the World Cup for the first time in 1983.

“Having said that, we probably should have had more cricket films.”

The long cricket-Bollywood ‘jinx’

Bollywood’s love affair with cricket began on a sticky wicket in the late 1950s, when a black and white film, Love Marriage, was released.

That was a time when cricket was played professionally only in its longest form – Tests – over five days. Though the game and cricketers were very popular, the slow pace of Test cricket did not particularly lend itself to on-screen drama.

Love Marriage was about love, but it cast cricket as cupid, making the young heroine fall for her dashing tenant when he scores a century.

For several years after Love Marriage, there was no cricket on the silver screen. But in the 1970s, when India beat England in England, and the West Indies in the West Indies – where batsman Sunil Gavaskar, having scored 774 runs in his debut Test series, was celebrated with a calypso song – cricketers became stars and even began appearing in films.

Gavaskar sang, danced and screamed “I love you” in a Marathi language film, and Salim Durani, a dashing Afghan-born Indian all-rounder known for hitting boundaries on fans’ demand, was cast as the romantic lead in a rather dreary Bollywood film, titled Charitra (Character).

Although these films did not do well at the box office, Bollywood began warming up to the idea of releasing cricket-related films around big tournaments and wins to cash in on the cricket craze.

In the 1980s, after India won their first World Cup, two cricketers from the winning squad were cast in a Bollywood film: batsman Sandeep Patil played the romantic interest of two women in a film, titled Kabhie Ajnabi The (We Were Strangers Once), with wicketkeeper Syed Kirmani playing a baddie.

In the same decade, two terribly tacky films, whose fictional plot involved a rivalry between cricketers, were also released. One was a romantic melodrama, and the other, Awwal Number (Number One), was plain bizarre. Its climatic sequence involved two helicopters and a cricketer, miffed at being dropped, trying to blow up a pitch where an India vs Australia match was under way.

“The cricket [in these films] was lame,” Vasan Bala, a Bollywood writer-director, told Al Jazeera.

“Growing up, we just knew that cricket and Bollywood never work. It was a completely jinxed thing.”

One film changed that.

The film that broke the jinx

Lagaan: Once Upon A Time In India, directed by Ashutosh Gowarikar with Bollywood star Aamir Khan in the lead, was released in 2001.

It was a massive hit and was nominated in the Best Foreign Film category at the Academy Awards.

Lagaan did not win, but it broke the jinx at home. It also split India’s cricket-in-cinema story into two – the drought before Lagaan, and the deluge after.

Set in the 1890s during the British Raj, in an Indian village that is reeling under drought and heavy taxation, the story of Lagaan (Tax) was not just about cricket. It was about colonial injustice, caste discrimination and moral conviction.

The film’s fictional story took inspiration from the first “all-Indian” cricket team that toured England in 1911.

The three-hour-and-38-minute long film was about what a ragtag team of poor villagers — Hindus, including, a disabled Dalit man with a natural spin, a Sikh, and a Muslim — do after a British officer challenges them to a game of cricket: “Beat us and no tax will be levied for two years. But if you lose, the tax will be tripled.”

It was a classic David versus Goliath story with a bit of romance and nationalistic fervour thrown in.

“Lagaan was a very clever film … I remember watching it in a theatre where the entire cinema hall became a stadium,” said director and cricket buff Srijit Mukherji, whose biographical drama on Mithali Raj, a former captain of Indian women’s cricket team, released last year.

Lagaan came a year after cricket had suffered a devastating blow. In a shocking match-fixing scandal, then-India captain Mohammad Azharuddin was implicated along with others. The skipper, whose graceful batting and popped collar once stood for stylish integrity, had betrayed fans and tainted cricket.

“In Lagaan, the excitement was not about cricket. The excitement was about watching characters whose life depends on this game,” Bala says.

Lagaan’s motley crew of cricketers went some way to restoring faith in the game and spawned a whole new generation of cricket films, including several lookalikes in Bollywood and regional cinema that were set in small towns and gully tournaments.

Many were forgettable, but a few stood out.

As well as Iqbal, there was MS Dhoni: The Untold Story, released in 2016. Starring Sushant Singh Rajput as the eponymous lead, Dhoni, and directed by one of Bollywood’s leading directors, Neeraj Pandey, it is a biopic of India’s former captain, Mahinder Singh Dhoni.

It follows his journey from working as a ticket checker at a small railway station in a dusty town to leading India to win their second World Cup in 2011.

A less popular box office film, but no less influential, was 83.

A $34m cricket film

“A sports film is good only when it’s a good underdog story. And 1983 was a classic story of the underdog,” says director Kabir Khan. “I don’t think anything can ever be as exciting as 83 because post-83, we were never the underdogs.”

His 2021 feature film on India’s ascent to becoming world champions in England in 1983, at a time when British bookies were reportedly offering 50:1 against them, is a homage not just to an iconic tournament that is etched in India’s collective memory, ball-for-ball, wicket-to-wicket, but also to the moment at Lord’s when captain Kapil Dev raised the World Cup trophy and cricket shed its colonial legacy and became a part of India’s national identity.

“India is a country where everyone is a self-styled cricket pundit and they’re ready to give even Sachin Tendulkar tips on batting. My goal was to make a film where nobody could stand up and say, ‘This doesn’t look like the original,’” Khan said.

Khan’s team spent about two years researching the tournament, even managing to recreate a match – in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, where Kapil Dev scored 175 not-out against Zimbabwe – for which no footage existed.

Actors trained for months, and Ranveer Singh, one of Bollywood’s leading stars who played Kapil Dev, spent two weeks with the former captain; not just learning to walk, talk and play like him, but to also embody his peculiar style of reticent, gentle swagger.

In 83, cricket was stellar. But this cinematic coup came with a pricey tag. Made on a budget of $34m, 83 is one of the most expensive films ever made in India.

Critics praised the film, but four days after its release in December 2021, theatres in India began to shut down due to the third wave of COVID and the film was a box office flop.

But 83 set a new benchmark for cricket films and fired up many cinematic ambitions.

Bollywood has released five cricket films after 83, including Srijit Mukherji’s Shabaash Mithu, which traces Mithali Raj’s journey from a small town to leading India’s women’s cricket team to the final at the 2017 Women’s World Cup, which they lost to England.

“They lost the battle but they won the war against misogyny, against discrimination, against the sorry state of affairs of women’s cricket and inspired an entire generation of girls and women to pick up the sport,” Mukherji said.

There is authenticity in Shabaash Mithu’s cricketing action, but it flopped, as did all the other films.

The jinx seems to be back. Or, perhaps, genteel nostalgia and the underdog story no longer have resonance in a country that has changed.

‘Films reflect society’

In the sequel to every David versus Goliath story, David becomes Goliath.

India is now one of the fastest-growing economies in the world and a cricket powerhouse in terms of viewership and revenue.

Meanwhile, aggressive Hindu supremacism has soared since the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014.

“Cricket and cinema are the last bastions of secularism, but they are also a reflection of our society,” writer-director Varun Grover said.

The India vs Pakistan Cricket World Cup match held in October was a blockbuster. Watched by 35 million viewers on Disney+Hotstar and more than 100,000 people in the stadium, for which tickets were reportedly sold for as high as 5,700,000 rupees ($69,170), the match was won by India.

But the crowds at Gujarat’s Narendra Modi Stadium, named after India’s prime minister, chanted “Jai Shri Ram” – a rallying cry of right-wing Hindus hailing a warrior God – as a taunt to Pakistani cricketers.

Another Bollywood film, titled Hukus Bukus, after a popular Kashmiri folk song, was released on November 3.

Set in Kashmir, it is a fictional story about a Hindu man desperately trying to build a temple dedicated to Hindu God Krishna in the contested Muslim-majority region, but he is up against Muslim politicians with vested interests. His son, a Tendulkar fan, plays a cricket match to get land for the temple.

“Films reflect society and its inflexions,” says Mukherji, “and cricket films are no different.”

“They have got to go in there and I mean really go in… I want everything that can fly to go in there and crack the hell out of them. There is no limitation on mileage and there is no limitation on budget. Is that clear?” That was the order US President Richard Nixon gave his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, on December 9, 1970.

Minutes later, Kissinger relayed the order to his deputy, General Alexander Haig: “He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn’t want to hear anything. It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies, on anything that moves. You got that?”

Over five decades ago, the US Air Force executed “Operation Menu” followed by “Operation Freedom Deal” to eradicate the Vietcong, the People’s Army of Vietnam, from Cambodia. It focused on carpet bombing vast swathes of land to destroy the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a massive network of pathways and tunnels used by the North Vietnamese through the jungle linking North to South Vietnam, via Cambodia and Laos.

The bombing of Cambodia had already started in 1965 under the Johnson administration; Nixon merely stepped it up. Between 1965 and 1973, 2.7 million tonnes of bombs were released over the country. In comparison, the Allies dropped an estimated 2 million tonnes of bombs during all of World War II.

Thus, Cambodia may be the most heavily bombed country in history. By square kilometre and thermic value, however, it might have already lost that tragic record to Gaza.

On day 25 of the war, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant boasted that more than 10,000 bombs and missiles had been dropped on Gaza City alone. According to the Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, the explosives used on the exclave as of November 2 may be twice as powerful as a nuclear bomb, thus exceeding the TNT-equivalent of Little Boy, the 15-kiloton atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

On November 5, an Israeli cabinet minister, Amichai Eliyahu, dropped another type of bomb by suggesting that the use of nuclear weapons on Gaza was an option. While he was “suspended” from the cabinet, his remarks may well have been the first time a sitting Israeli official confirmed publicly the open secret of Israel’s nuclear arsenal.

The first glaring difference between the bombing of Cambodia and the bombing of Gaza is that the former was kept secret from the US Congress, the American people and the world as bizarre as it may sound today; it was obviously not-so-secret to the Cambodians. The incessant bombardment of Gaza, however, is boasted about to the world by Israeli leaders and receives overt encouragement and material support from the US and other Western powers.

The second difference is that while Cambodian civilians could try to run away from the terrifying roaring sound of incoming B-52 squadrons, Palestinians in Gaza, overwhelmingly refugees or descendants of refugees themselves, have nowhere to flee to in the hope of living another day.

Strangely, US President Joe Biden has questioned the accuracy of the death toll the Palestinian Ministry of Health has released, giving credence to similar Israeli claims. This is despite the fact that his own staff believes in those numbers, and even estimates that they may be higher, as Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf recently stated.

US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has also repeated the Israeli narrative that Hamas “terrorists” use UN schools, hospitals, mosques and churches as command-and-control posts, munition and arms storage depots, which makes them legitimate military targets.

International humanitarian law, however, suggests otherwise for even if the unproven Israeli claims were substantiated, the principle of proportionality prohibits attacks against military objectives when they are “expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated”.

Israel would be hard-pressed to make its case when over 11,000 Palestinians civilians have been killed, including more than 4,500 children and infants, with additional thousands decomposing under the rubble.

Worse still, Israeli government and military officials have repeatedly demonstrated genocidal intent by declaring that there are “no innocents” in Gaza. Before the UN Security Council, Israel has even accused UN ambulance drivers, medical staff and aid workers of being members of Hamas, trying to justify the murder of over 100 such workers and the direct, wilful targeting of Gaza’s hospitals

In view of the patent commission of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide as eminent jurists allege, the majority of governments the world over have disgracefully remained silent. It is distressing to witness the cautionary stance of states ready to maintain diplomatic relations with Israel in the face of its all-out bombardments of the civilian population of Gaza

When Egypt, Jordan, UAE, Morocco or Turkey – not to mention Western powers, China or India – continue to maintain diplomatic and economic relations with Israel, why should the latter revisit its decade-long policies of apartheid, of dehumanisation and delegitimisation of Palestinians, of oppression and subjugation of the Palestinian people, if there is no price to pay?

Why should Israel stop its relentless bombing of the Gaza exclave? Why should it rethink its illegal occupation and colonisation? Why should it even listen when the secretary-general of the Arab League, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, accuses it of perpetrating “genocide” and Arab leaders make perfunctory declarations but take no decisive action at the Arab-Islamic Summit?

Calling for a “humanitarian ceasefire” as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has, or for a straightforward “ceasefire” he hasn’t even dared demand, is necessary but grossly inadequate. After 37 days of unrelenting bombardment to “eradicate Hamas”, there is little evidence that goal is within reach.

For one, Hamas is not only present in Gaza but also in the occupied West Bank and elsewhere. And even if, theoretically, Israel were to effectively terminate Hamas in Gaza, just as it had once sought to do with Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation, what comes next?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself doesn’t really know, does he? Or maybe he knows, but can’t tell. As he has put it, “a long and difficult” war lies ahead. Translated, this means the continuation of the genocidal onslaught on the Palestinians, unless and until the position of his Western backers – and Arab bystanders – shifts in words and in deeds.

To date, only Bolivia has severed diplomatic relations with Israel to protest against the ongoing war crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians. Unless Egypt, Jordan, UAE and Morocco sever their diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv as their people demand; unless countries such as Turkey, South Africa and Brazil, which have denounced Israel’s war crimes, align their diplomacy with their own pronouncements; unless these countries emulate Bolivia’s principled diplomatic move and put pressure on their Western partners; unless Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iran, Qatar, Azerbaijan and other large exporters of oil and natural gas use their economic leverage on Israel’s blinded backers, Gaza and its population will be destroyed, inch by inch, soul by soul. And no one would be able to say: “We didn’t know.”

Biden, Blinken and Netanyahu should be reminded that the horrific carpet bombing of Cambodia for years produced only one seminal political outcome: Cambodia’s takeover by the infamous Khmer Rouge. What the posited annihilation of Hamas would yield is thus not a frivolous question. “Anything that flies, on anything that moves” and bombing to “crack the hell out of them” sowed death and craters still visible today. It produced infamy and misery, but no military victory.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.