I WAS going through one of my favourite reads the other day, a publication I get from Britain, and three short items made me squirm. I thought I would share them with you.
In Canada, a free yoga class for beginners and the disabled at the University of Ottawa has been cancelled because they are an ‘unacceptable cultural appropriation’ of an Indian practice.
The Ottawa Student Federation had the classes banned because the student members felt ‘uncomfortable’ with the fact that ‘many cultures from which such things as yoga had been borrowed had experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonisation and Western supremacy’.
In Britain, the Church of England has said that cinemas should not show any advertisements that mention Christmas (it’s a December issue of the magazine), in response to its own advertisement promoting the Lord’s Prayer being banned in cinemas.
The short video features lines from the prayer either sung or spoken by a range of people, from children to bodybuilders. Apparently the powers that be in charge of advertisements shown in British cinemas believe that the ad could be offensive to non-believers.
And then across the world to everyone’s favourite holiday destination, Pyongyang, North Korea, which will be one of a tiny handful of countries around the world that will not be seeing Hamlet, as put on by the Shakespeare Globe.
The company has visited virtually every country in the world on a marathon tour, but not North Korea.
The authorities in Pyongyang have demanded that if Shakespeare’s classic play be presented in North Korea it should include ‘more music, dancing and acrobatics’.
To give him credit, the Shakespeare Globe’s artistic director said that there was a limited amount of music, dancing and acrobatics in Hamlet, that was the way Shakespeare wrote it and that’s the way it stays.
This Hamlet has been staged in 197 countries around the world, including before 4000 people in Khartoum, Sudan, and 23 people in a church hall on a small Pacific island.
Apart from North Korea, the only other countries which have had to manage without Hamlet are Libya, Syria and the Central African Republic.
Let’s leave the last word to the Bard – ‘Angels and ministers of grace defend us!’ (Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 4).
And a final thought, staying with culture, but this time the culture of the supermarket.
Another report in the same publication makes this astonishing revelation — 12 percent of Britons from the age of 16 to 24 think honey is produced by farmers squeezing bees.
An impressive 20 percent think fish fingers are made from the fingers of fish, while 15 percent don’t know that lamb comes from sheep. Nine percent think potatoes grow on trees.
I think I should end there, cheers!
Source: The Week: The Best of the British and Foreign Media.
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