Sunday, November 18, 2012

The Rundown




Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez
The Rundown is a 30 minute radio show by Mayar Azmy, Nadine El Shiaty and Mai Abdel Moaty. They talk about different Hollywood headlines and what is going on with the entertainment world.
Later on they interview Nadim George, an Egyptianiv>
cinematographer. He discusses his experience with the movie world in Egypt and where he plans on seeing himself in a few years.

Saturday, November 10, 2012

The Kite Runner (Narration)


The Kite Runner Khaled Hosseini 

Google Images

There were a lot of reasons why I went to Hazarjat to find Hassan in 1986. The biggest one, Allah forgive me, was that I was lonely. By then, most of my friends and relatives had either been killed or had escaped the country to Pakistan or Iran. I barely knew anyone in Kabul anymore, the city where I had lived my entire life. Everybody had fled. I would take a walk in the Karteh-Parwan section- where the melon vendors used to hand in the old days, you remember that spot? - and I wouldn't recognize anyone there. No one to greet, no one to sit down with for chai, no one to share stories with, just Roussi soliders patrolling the streets. So eventually I stopped going out to the city. I would spend my days in your father's house, up in the study, reading your mother's old books, listening to the news, watching the communist propaganda on television. Then I would pray namaz, cook something, eat, read some more, pray again, and go to bed. I would rise in the morning, pray, do it all over again. 

And with my arthritis, it was getting harder for me to maintain the house. My knees and back were always aching- I would get up in the morning and it would take me at least an hour to shake the stiffness from my joints, especially in the wintertime. I did not want to let your father's house go to rot; we had all had many good times in that house, so many memories, Amir jan. It was not right- your father had designed that house himself; it had meant so much to him, and besides, I had promised him I would take care for it when he and you left for Pakistan. Now it was just me and the house... and I did my best. I tried to water the trees every few days, cut the lawn, tend to the flowers, fix things that needed fixing, but, even then, I was not a young girl anymore. 

But even so, I might have been able to manage. At least for a while longer. But when news of your fathers death reached me ... for the first time, I felt a terrible loneliness in that house. An unbearable emptiness. 

So one day, I fueled up the car and drove up to Hazarjat, I remembered that, after Ali dismissed himself from the house, your father told me he and Hassan had moved to small village just outside Bamiyan. Ali had a cousin there as I recalled. I had no idea if Hassan would still be there, if anyone would even known of him or his whereabouts. After all, it had been 10 years since Ali and Hassan had left your fathers house. Hassan would have been a grown man in 1986, twenty-two, twenty-three years old. If he was even alive, that is - the Shorawi, may they rot in hell for what they did to our watan, killed so many of our young men. I don't have to tell you that. 

But, with the grace of God, I found him there. It took very little searching- all I had to do was ask a few questions in Bamyian and people pointed me to his village. I do not even recall its name, or whether it even had one. But i remember it was a scorching summer day and I was driving up a rutted dirt road, nothing on either side but sunbaked bushes, spiny tree trunks, and dried grass like pale straw. I passed a dead donkey rotting on the side of the road. And then I turned a corner and, right in the middle of that barren land, I saw a cluster of mud houses, beyond them nothing but broad sky and mountains like jagged teeth. 

The people in Bamiyan had told me I would find him easily- he lived in the only house in the village that had a walled garden. The mud wall, short and pocked with holes, enclosed the tiny house- which was really not much more than a glorified hut. Barefoot children were playing on the street, kicking a ragged tennis ball with a stick, and they stared when I pulled up and killed the engine. I knocked on the wooden door and stepped through into a yard that had very little in it save for a parched strawberry patch and a bare lemon tree.

*I used an M-audio to record this narration