As America pushes back the vanguard of global terrorism and the thugacracy scabs that they produce, one can’t help but get a sick gnawing feeling as Western pop culture moves in.
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Amid War - Passion for TV Chefs, Soaps and Idols
By Joao Silva
The New York Times
Published August 1, 2007
KABUL, Afghanistan — Seven years ago, during a very different time in a very different Afghanistan, a medical student named Daoud Sediqi was bicycling from campus when he was stopped by the Taliban’s whip-wielding religious police. The young man immediately felt an avalanche of regret, for he was in violation of at least two laws.
One obvious offense was the length of his hair. While the ruling Taliban insisted that men sprout untrimmed beards, they were otherwise opposed to scruffiness and the student had allowed his locks to grow shaggy. His other transgression was more serious. If his captors searched his possessions, they would find a CD with an X-rated movie.
“Fortunately, they didn’t look; my only punishment was to have my head shaved because of my long hair,” recalled Mr. Sediqi, now at age 26 one of this nation’s best-known men, someone sprung from a new wellspring of fame — not a warlord or a mullah, but a television celebrity, the host of “Afghan Star,” this nation’s “American Idol.”
Since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, Afghanistan has been developing in fits and starts. Among the unchanging circumstances that still leave people fitful: continuing war, inept leaders, corrupt police officers and woeful living conditions. According to the government’s latest surveys, only 43 percent of all households have nonleaking windows and roofs, 31 percent have safe drinking water and 7 percent have sanitary toilets.
But television is off to a phenomenal start, with Afghans now engrossed, for better or worse, in much of the same escapist fare that seduces the rest of the world: soap operas that pit the unbearably conniving against the implausibly virtuous, chefs preparing meals that most people would never eat in kitchens they could never afford, talk show hosts wheedling secrets from those too shameless to keep their troubles to themselves.
For full story...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/01/wo...hp&oref=slogin
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