Namesake Film Analysis

Traditional Masculinity is being displayed and defined by Ashoke, in honoring his family’s wishes in marrying Ashima. Ashoke portrays the role of a more traditional husband working and living in the Industrial Era. Ashoke is a good father, husband ,and a good moral provider. Throughout the movie he is shown teaching Ashima and Gogol. One example of this Ashoke and Ashima first arrive in New York; after a flight halfway around the world, he tells his new wife to lie down and he will make her tea. Her face carries a look of astonishment. She replies “I can’t.” He proclaims that this is America, “Things are different here in America.” This is not traditional Bengali ways. His new bride is not sure what to think. Another example of Ashoke teaching his new bride is Ashima wanting to show her new husband that she can take care of him. She wanders to the laundry mat to do laundry, shrinking Ashoke’s clothing in the process. Ashoke, seeing this, negatively sanctions (Macintyre, 2006) her. He explains how the Indian rupee is in comparison to our American dollar. Realizing

In the Namesake, the new parents are faced with a decision to name their son. A tradition where the Grandmother on the Mothers’ side names the baby. Ashima’s Grandmother was sending word about the baby’s name from India. After not hearing from the Grandmother, a proper name

While Mukherjee decided to embrace the new American culture, her sister decided to stick to her Indian roots. Mukherjee struggles to try and find where she belongs because she is always changing for others rather than for herself. Encountering differences is something she dealt with on her journey of creating her identity, she states, “Nearly 20 years ago, when I was living in my husband’s ancestral homeland of Canada, I was always well-employed but never allowed to feel part of the local Quebec or larger Canadian society” (Mukherjee 293). While changing herself to conform for others, we can all take a lesson from Mukherjee. In life, we go through many changes because we are growing up, becoming more mature, and finding things we like or dislike. We tend to change because of the people we surround ourselves with, like friends or coworkers in order to be accepted. However, she did not seem happy to be forced into a position where she had to conform to the way people would talk to her all for the sake of her husband. This takes away from building and developing one’s own identity because it does not represent who you really are. In society, we are sort of growing away from that in a sense people are taking pride in their identities. For instance, immigrants, women, and races are all

Many second generation minorities from immigrant parents are driven subconsciously to conform to new culture and social norms. For foreign born parents and native born children integrating the two cultures they inhabit brings about different obstacles and experiences. In Jhumpa’s “The Namesake” the protagonist Gogol is a native born American with foreign born parents. The difference with birth location plays an important role in assimilating to a new society in a new geography. The difficulty for parents is the fact that they’ve spent a decent amount of time accustomed to a new geography, language, culture and society which makes it difficult to feel comfortable when all of that changes. For Gogol the difficulty only lies with the cultural norms imposed by his parent’s and the culture and social norms that are constantly presented in the new society.

A person’s heritage and cultural identity may be lost when moving to a new country where the culture is different and other cultures are not easily accepted. In the short story “Hindus”, Bharati Mukherjee uses setting, characters and the plot to discuss what it is like to lose your cultural identity while being a visible minority in America. Mukherjee uses the plot to describe the events that take place in the main characters life that lead her to realize how different the culture and life is in the America’s. She also uses the characters as a way of demonstrating how moving away from one’s culture and heritage can change a person’s perspective and ways of thinking. Mukerjee also uses setting in her story to identity the physical differences in culture between living in India and America. Alike the setting and characters, the plot helps describe the loss of culture with a sequence of events.

The first discussion video and Barry Schwartz believe if you limit choices, people will tend to make a better decision while being happy with the choices they have made. However, Malcom Gladwell has an opposite view, since he believes if you give people choices and varieties to choose from, they will select the reasonable choices based on their standard that will be beneficial to them.

In Mira Nair’s film, The Namesake, the disparate cultures of India and America affirms to the binary paradigm of “the one” and “the other”, manifesting the dominance of one from the other and its impact to influence and cause cultural and identity issues. The collision of the two cultures forms a process of trying to construct an identity and a destruction of an ethnic identity, with different factors to consider such as space and other sociocultural codes. This film about the Indian American also shows the concept of model-minority image, standards and expectations imposed to Asian Americans. The Namesake embodies the cultural and identity issues of an Asian American, particularly the Indian Americans, exemplifying the experiences of the

When Ashima and Ashoke move to America, they have two children, Nikhil and Sonia, who are both quite immersed in American culture. While their children are like this, they try to hold onto their own Indian cultural traditions. Because of that, the family can be divided many times. In particular, Nikhil doesn’t always respect his family’s culture which proves to be very challenging for Ashima and Ashoke because they remain attached to that culture when they move and want him to grow up a certain way. Although the audience can not blame them for feeling this way, it is easy to sympathize with Nikhil as well. Many children of immigrants embrace their heritage, but that is not the case at all with Nikhil. He hides it from people, embarrassed by it, for most of the story. Of course that upsets Ashima and Ashoke and makes them want to push their son into accepting the Indian culture as his own.

The Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies department presented, the movie, Straight Outta Compton to raise awareness on racism, sexism, and oppression. The two-hour event was hosted by Malia Lee Womack and Sarah Mamo inside of an Ohio State University lecture room. During the event, Straight Outta Compton was played and there was a discussion after the film about the themes in the film. Some questions brought up in the discussion were “Racism is reoccurring in the film and that includes police brutality, in what ways is it similar to current situations in the United States considering the Black Lives Matter movement?”, and “How are women portrayed in the film?” From the guiding questions, anyone could easily see how the material presented in

Every day there are people from foreign countries who immigrate to the United States in search of new opportunities and to establish a new life. The Namesake is a heartwarming family movie that accurately portrays the difficulties that some of these immigrants face when beginning their lives in their new homeland and trying to assimilate themselves into the foreign culture. The themes of family, cultural diversity, and identity crisis were displayed prominently throughout the film. Director Mira Nair has personally gone through the same situation, which made her the perfect director for this movie. Nair came to the United States from India when she was in college (“Mira Nair”).

The Graduate is a 1967 film starring Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock, Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson, and Katharine Ross as Elaine Robinson. The film follows Benjamin Braddock, a recent college graduate, who has an affair with a friend of his parents, but ends up falling in love with her daughter. The Graduate starts with Ben in an airport. The whole sequence is melancholy because the sound overlays “The Sound of Silence” with an airport employee over the intercom. This scene is very melancholy in it cinematography as well, and this is accomplished by filming Ben using a dolly system so no matter how long he walks, he never seems to go anywhere.

This paper will examine the following; the description of Loss, Grief / Bereavement faced by the main character from the film, an indebt analysis of defined concepts/examples, theories and models connected with the main character, as illustrated in the film, the summary/developmental issues of loss, grief/bereavement, the distinction of common, normal and anticipatory grief, different stages/models of grief, cultural response to grief, the application of relevant theoretical concepts/ framework in the course to the main character’s grief, loss bereavement issues, the application of appropriate intervention, adaptive coping skills/ adjustment and the implications of the approach to social work practice.

Home of Our Own was a movie that helped solidify my thoughts on the fact that families come in all different shapes and sizes. After taking the sociology course Marriage and Family last semester, I learned about all the different types of families outside of the traditional, nuclear family. The Lacy family is considered a single parent family because of the death of Francis’s husband. It is important to understand all the different forms a family can take, especially as a social worker. There may be people within a family that play a vital role that may not be considered “traditional” such as an uncle or grandparent. There may be people within a family that in a nuclear family would be an extremely important role model, such as a mom or dad,

Nitin and Priya are Indian American Immigrants and consider to be the first generation. The first generation Indian Americans are mindful of the apparent cultural differences. The family struggles with the battle of where modernity clashes with tradition, which Indian culture clashes with American culture, and this is where theory clashes with custom. The American culture develop the basis for interaction outside the home (www.people.bu.edu). Also, inside the home the first generation of Indian Americans attempt to preserve their cultural

Imagine that two men, ragged and exhausted, have found their way onto a cold shoreline and collapse. Having witnessed death and feeling like death, they had finally returned home. These two men had just returned from the Crusades, where they had initially acted out of their religious idealism and returned with that idealism destroyed. The viewer cannot say for sure what these two men had witnessed, or what they had done, all in the name of God. All that can be established from these opening, dialogue free scenes is that both men have returned damaged men, men who have seemingly lost some sort of will, and most possibly some sort of faith. These men have arrived home, but their home has now been hit by fear and disease.