Anirvan Chatterjee

Sunday was our second day spent with PRAN in Noakhali, Bangladesh, learning about local climate justice issues and concepts. Masud-bhai from PRAN took us to visit a community of Hurricane Alia survivors, where landless farmers are building new lives for themselves in incredibly low-lying land. If climate change plays out as predicted, residents may be impacted by rising seas, destruction of soil fertility via increased salinity, and increased chance of devastating cyclones. We walked knee-deep through mud and water to reach newly upraised land these men and women call home, and came home to fill our evening with song and strategy.

We tell most strangers that we're from Kolkata. It is techically true, as that's where we entered Bangladesh from, but we enjoy the fact that it makes for a simpler story and a lower profile than the truth. (Who wants to explain three sets of immigration histories? Or that B and I are Americans, giving vendors the go-ahead to try to fleece us?)

In Dhaka, folks are generally pretty happy to hear that's we're from Kolkata. Some ask us how we like their city or country. Others share stores of trips to Kolkata or elsewhere in India, or of Indians they've met in the course of work. But in Noakhali, a relatively small town, telling folks that we're from Kolkata, India got us a lot of attention.

We think of India and Bangladesh as being like the US and Canada -- two neighboring countries that aren't fundamentally all that different. Even if one hadn't been to the other country, it my mind, we were alike enough. But at our guesthouse, at the nearby tea shop, and particularly at local restaurants, some folks we talked to were wide-eyed. As Indians, we were treated the way "real" foreigners would have been. But those real foreigners--the white and East Asian businesspeople, NGO workers, and tourists we saw in Dhaka--don't make it out to places like Noakhali in large numbers. In Noakhali, India's foreign enough. The crowd of restaurant service workers huddled around us during lunch and dinner asked questions, were thrilled to hear us tell them what we thought about their city and their country. We gave a particularly curious nineteen year old, a restaurant employee midway through his daily 12-hour shift, a souvenir from our country: an Indian ten rupee note. He broke out in a massive grin, thrilled, and finally unable to speak in his sheer excitement. B and I kept talking about the wonder and pathos of his grin.

We felt like rock stars, or space aliens. We felt white. We sometimes had to remind folks that India was also a developing country, like Bangladesh, and that they had major cities like Dhaka at home.

So why was India such a big deal here? It seemed to center around money. We tried to figure out all the ways locals might get their information. Even in Bangladesh's largely self-sufficient media market, India was still a major exporter of mass culture, including Bollywood movies and Bengali TV shows, many of which show well-fed upper-middle to upper-class people. Offline, the only Indians some locals saw in person were international travelers, often middle-class or above. Finally, some residents may have had first-hand experience, a few as travelers, and perhaps others as undocumented workers, coming from a city known for sending many young to work abroad.

For some local residents, what we had parsed as a Canada-US relationship may have been more like a Mexico-US relationship, with India not just a powerful neighbor, but a superpower, a source of culture, wealth, and employment--with all that implies. Indians don't know what kind of soft power they have--if only they were to stop focusing on governments and think about people-to-people relationships.

We got up early Saturday to take a local bus from Dhaka to Noakhali District, best known to Indians as the site of Muslim-Hindu religious violence sixty years ago. We arrived in about 4 hours, and were met by our online friend Masud, who took us to a local guesthouse, and then to meet members of his NGO, PRAN, where we spent the rest of the day interviewing, sharing, and chatting about climate issues (more on this elsewhere).

One of the things we noticed while talking to PRAN staff, utterly unrelated to the content of our conversation, is how well they spoke Bengali. They weren't alone. Bangladeshis generally seem to speak excellent Bengali, unlike many West Bengalis, who frequently produce Bengali peppered with (and sometimes replaced by) English or Hindi, presumably from osmosis living in a tremendously linguistically-diverse part of the world.

People of a certain class in West Bengal seem to speak "Benglish" more than they do Bengali. I've never heard Bangladeshis say things like "আমরা feel করছি" -- incorporating English words into even very simple Bengali speech, something not at all unknown in West Bengal. I'm not at all against incorporating foreign expressions and vocabulary into one's language; but after hearing such lovely Bengali in Bangladesh, the contrast makes clear to me that what I hear on the other side of the border is more of a linguistic hybrid than I'd ever realized.

I'd assumed the biggest linguistic difference between West Bengal and Bangladesh would be different regional accents and terms. I was even listening to Bangladeshi podcasts, to acclimate myself to the accent. But understanding the accent's been a breeze, compared to understanding the larger spoken vocabulary; I should have been listening to podcasts for the vocabulary, not accent. I'm surprised that "they" speak our language much better than "us," in spite of all the pride West Bengalis take in their love of the language (and the occasional jibes at the Bangladeshi accent). It's nice to have one's assumptions questioned.

We'd fallen in love with Dhaka's rickshaw art--the graphic images on the back of cycle-rickshaws all over town. So we headed to "Bicycle Street," the wholesale marketplace where rickshaw owners buy art for their machines. But Friday was a holiday, something we hadn't counted on. We were disappointed to see the area entirely closed up, so we wandered the neighborhood, and then took a fun traffic-free rickshaw ride to the lovely Sitara Mosque, then to Lalbagh Fort. Finally, we walked to Dhakeswari Temple, where local middle/upper-class Hindu Bengalis were celebrating Saraswati Puja; it felt like the expat Hindu Bengali events I'd grown up around.

Lalbagh Fort was the high point of my day, perhaps of my week. It's a Mughal era fortress complex, very nicely preserved, along with the surrounding grounds. It was fun to look at, but the real excitement began when the grounds began to slowly fill up with Dhaka residents out enjoying a weekend afternoon in beautiful surroundings. This place that was once a space for royalty had now been taken over by the masses. We had stumbled upon people-watching heaven.

We saw groups of women hanging out, kids playing running games, families dressed up for a day out. Several athletic young men bounded over a very tall fence into a prohibited area; when a police officer came by, they sheepishly climbed back over, one by one. A woman in a hijab confided to a friend on her cell phone; it sounded like her parents had gotten in the way of her last relationship. An older women and a pre-teen girl walked by the central building, peering through the windows, trying to see what was inside. A group of well-dressed thirtysomething men and women sat in the grass, huddled around a laptop. Children played, running up hillocks in the grass, and helping each other lower themselves into a garden water tank that looked like a empty swimming pool.

And then there were all the young couples--pairs of men and women sitting together in the grass, on ledges, between bushes. They created a private world around them, smiling, sometimes holding hands, ignoring everyone else nearby. The couples-sitting-in-the-park phenomenon is pretty common in India as well, as young lovers have limited access to private space away from family. I've heard people express irritation at how parks taken over by smoochy couples limits access for other users, but that wasn't happening here. I almost wished we were one of them. The grounds on this Friday afternoon was a lovely vision of all kinds of people enjoying themselves in happy coexistence.

Sharing this historic setting with a colorful local crowd on an ordinary weekend afternoon was one of our most memorable travel experiences, but we wouldn't have known it from our Lonely Planet. Some of the happiest moments on our trip have involved people-watching at parks, plazas, and shopping malls. I love serendipity, but I wish travel guide authors would help us out a bit more; we can't be the only ones who enjoy seeing people as much as seeing a string of sights.

B, her dad, and I hired a car for the day and hit the road. First, we hit the Jatiyo Smriti Shoudho in Savar, a memorial to the hundreds of thousands who died during the liberation war. Then off to nearby Dhamrai to see an artisan workshop creating bronze sculpture using a traditional "lost wax" technique. Finally, a quick stop at the Sat Gumbad mosque, built in 1680, and to the National Assembly building, completed in 1982.

Being in a Muslim-majority nation feels weirdly liberating. As a young brown man with a beard living in post-9/11 America, I fit the rough stereotype of Young Muslim Male. It may not be a problem 99% of the time, but I can't entirely escape a racialized consciousness; there's a reason why my parents ask me to shave my beard, why I'm particularly well-behaved at airports, why seeing trucks or motorcycles carrying American flags makes me worry about my safety. I enjoy the fact that in a majority-Muslim country where I sort of look like everyone else, that sense of racialization disappears entirely. The streets are full of clean-cut bearded guys. I may not pass as a local everyman (I'm presumably being read at first glance as a possibly-Muslim upper-class urbanite), but no one would mistake me as dangerous because I might "look Muslim."

Being in 90%-Muslim Bangladesh has also made me feel very much part of a Hindu tribe (9% of the population). Walking around in Old Dhaka with B and her dad, we met a Hindu storekeeper with family near where B's family lives; the pictures of Hindu gods in the store jumped out at me among all his neighbors' culturally-Muslim paraphernelia. We went on to walk through Dhaka's "Hindu Street," seeing crowds of happy Hindu families celebrating Saraswati Puja. At the Liberation War Museum, we met a helpful museum employee; when we asked for directions to a local temple, it was immediately clear she was Hindu. In Dhamrai, we visited Dhamrai Metal Craft, an artisan workshop creating bronze sculptures via an intricate "lost wax" technique. The Banik family that runs the space are locally-prominent Hindus in a community that was once majority-Hindu, but has gained a large Muslim population since the 1971 war. It felt like we self-censored when discussion turned to local (i.e. Muslim) reactions to Hindu religious figures in the presence of our Muslim driver, not wanting to cause offense.

Within our first few days here, we've had several interactions with other Hindus, and the level of quick intimacy has been surprising. We often jump very quickly to issues of safety in the wake of decades of rising and falling anti-Hindu sentiment. Hindus we've spoken to understand the dangers of anti-minority fundamentalism--both anti-Hindu sentiment in Bangladesh as well as anti-Muslim sentiment in India. I can be as philosophically humanist as I want to, but in a situation where there are only two tribes that matter, and that tribal identity is fixed at birth, and embedded in one's name, family customs, and personal habits, it's hard to opt out.

When strangers find out we're visiting via Kolkata, there have been a few instances when we've been very politely asked what religion we follow. We've never hesitated to answer "Hindu," and the answer's invariably been met with smiles. "Ah, so you must not eat beef" surmised an employee at a small-town restaurant where we'd puzzlingly ordered only fish and vegetable dishes. Another man went out of his way to emphasize that he held no communal (i.e. "racial") sentiments, expressing that we're all Bengali, and that he was happy to live in harmony with his Hindu neighbors. We've had a few long conversations spring up. I realize good feelings on an interpersonal basis are complicated by histories of anti-Hindu discrimination, driving millions of Hindus from the region into India as refugees--and yet Bangladeshis are by far the nicest people we've met on our trip, and it's been a delight sharing moments of friendly exchange across barriers.

Racialized identity is complex. If I'm Muslim-identified living in the US (i.e. "Arab/Muslim/South Asian"), I'm equally happy being Hindu-identified in Bangladesh. After all:

"Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10 p.m., a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains." --Subcomandante Marcos

We woke up early the next day to run errands, then off to the Liberation War Museum. We  spent the afternoon with friends old and new, meandering through crowded allies in Old Dhaka, and checking out local Hindu Saraswati Puja pandals (community altars).

Dhaka's Liberation War Museum documents the struggles of Bangladeshis to win political and cultural autonomy, culminating in independence in 1971. (The standard outline: when India and Pakistan gained freedom from Britain in 1947, geographically-separated but majority-Muslim Bangladesh and Pakistan (then "East Pakistan" and "West Pakistan") were lumped into the common Muslim nation of Pakistan. West Pakistani leaders clamped down on Bangladesh's Hindu/Muslim hybrid language and culture, and engaged in economic exploitation. Bangladeshis fought back, first within the system, then calling for more autonomy, and finally winning independence in the face of a West Pakistani military campaign of mass repression, rape, and murder.) The Liberation War Museum is excellent, with a wide range of exhibits, and very clear paragraph-length descriptions for each object. We walked away with a PDA full of notes on names and stories to research. It's all fine and good to speak of people's struggles in impersonal terms, but the museum was effective in bringing three decades of struggle down to a human level:

• a newspaper clipping reporting the Pakistan government's banning radio stations from broadcasting works by Bengali Nobel Prize winner (and Hindu) Rabindranath Tagore
• an photo of a female student leader at Dhaka University, standing up to police repression
• stories and personal articles of soldiers who died in the war
• lovely liberation war posters, calling for pan-Bengali cultural unity across religious lines
• photographs, and skulls, of the dead, murdered by West Pakistanis

The loss of Ted Kennedy's Senate seat to a Republican was in our heads that day. Signage at The Liberation War Museum described Ted Kennedy's role as an ally to the Bengali people in the face of Nixon's pro-Pakistan anti-Bangladesh stance; a photograph shows him with Mother Teresa, visiting an Indian camp for Bangladeshi refugees fleeing Pakistani terror. The very previous day, we'd read an editorial in the newspaper calling on the government of Bangladesh to honor critical foreign supporters like Ted Kennedy.

It's very hard being half a world away, and seeing all the good that can be done by a lone senator from Massachusetts with a penchant for international human rights -- and then seeing that seat occupied by a man best known nationally for railing against the health care reform process. Whether we like it or not, our provincial domestic U.S. politics casts a long shadow around the world.

We spent our first day in Bangladesh at the Indian consulate trying to make sure we could get back into India (a matter still in limbo), before exploring the Gulshan neighborhood of Dhaka, littered with expensive homes, and financial and NGO offices.

A recent Indian "anti-terrorist" policy bars most travelers from re-entering within 60 days of their last exit. This keeps tourists from using India as a base to explore nearby countries, or Indians abroad from making emergency family visits after a previous trip. This was big news in India, with the Minister of State for External Affairs criticizing the policy on Twitter, and then facing a barrage of criticism for expressing opinions without going through bureaucratic channels.

Indian officials stated that this will impact very few genuine travelers; turns turns out we're one of them, since we'd been planning to take a side trip to Bangladesh from India with B's dad. Officials also announced relaxation of the rules for genuine travelers, something we double-checked with US and Indian government offices and websites. Our trip was fine, an Indian consular official in Dhaka told us -- all we had to do was get someone at the Dhaka Indian consulate to endorse our re-entry as genuine travelers, per those newly relaxed rules.

We spent several hours of our first full day in Bangladesh at the Indian consulate, trying to get someone who knew what was going on. Folks we spoke to hadn't even heard of the "no re-entry within 60 days" rule, let alone the subsequent relaxation. B had a fit, experiencing massive bureaucratic incompetence that might keep her from being able to go back to the country she grew up in.

B, her dad, and I have since made another visit to the consulate, made several phone calls, and sent some frantic emails. We're cautiously optimistic that we'll be able to work our way through this Indian bureaucratic nightmare to finish our family trip in India, but the situation isn't clear. Our Bangladesh visa runs out in about two weeks, and unless we get permission to return to India, we'll have to cancel our plans and self-deport to a third country.

It's unfortunate that we're having to waste time during our visit to Bangladesh dealing with idiotic policies. We'd promised B's mom and my 93-year-old grandfather that we'd come back and see them; it's misguided policy if this is being put under the category of evil terroristic acts.

We spent Monday on the bus. B, her dad, and I trooped into a Green Line long-distance bus in Kolkata at 9:00 am. We spent three and a half hours passing through grey, fairly uninteresting roads, heading westwards through West Bengal, India, toward Bangladesh. The fun began at the border zone, where an incompetent Indian government employee didn't want to let us leave the country; he had to escalate the conversation to a senior official before he figured out we were allowed to exit. Then we passed into no man's land, which, puzzlingly, was a busy small town street filled with people. An employee from our bus company helped us through what felt like a maze of badly-marked buildings, as we prepared to enter Bangladesh.

As we stepped across the border line, Bangladesh looked just like India, but for one thing. The police officers all wore matching green jackets. On the back of each jacket was the word "পুলিশ": "POLICE" in Bengali. It was lovely: we were in a truly Bengali nation, where signage was in almost-universally-intelligible Bengali, the language of the people, rather than in colonial English.

I imagine that this is how some some Jewish visitors must feel during their first trip to Israel, seeing Hebrew, previously experienced as a private cultural or religious language, used as the modern language of an entire nation-state.

I think I understand the tug of linguistic and cultural nationalism a little better now. In the Bengali-majority Indian state of West Bengal, official signage is frequently in English (or Hindi) in deference to the broad linguistic diversity of the state and nation's residents. As a Bengali, seeing "পুলিশ" on the jackets of police officers gave me warm fuzzies. I had finally set foot in a Bangladesh (literally: Bengali land).

Passing through the border, we got lunch, and got back on a lovely bus, where we slept, looked out the window, and watched Bangladeshi made-for-TV movies. Seven hours mostly flew by, except for a slow ferry crossing across the Padma, the river that traditionally separated East and West Bengal. We arrived in Dhaka at nearly 11:00 pm, and found ourselves stuck in the middle of a jam, our first sight of the City of Traffic.

Gopal Chandra Ganguly didn't touch Muslims. When they came to his house, they were served with separate plates and glasses, to avoid having his Hindu Brahmin family contaminated by their ritual impurity. My grandmother's grandfather didn't hate Muslims; he worked and interacted with them, as long as they knew to keep their infernal Islamic cooties out of his upper-caste Hindu home in Calcutta, India.

The British would finally quit India the following year after a century of anti-colonial struggle, but in 1946, the future of the nation was still being hotly debated in conferences and dining rooms across the subcontinent -- and no issue loomed larger than the Hindu-Muslim question. In formerly peaceful Calcutta, in both majority Hindu and Muslim neighborhoods, racist mobs led attacks on members of the religious minority--the Great Calcutta Riot.

Anti-Muslim riots were spreading closer to his neighborhood when my great-great-grandfather approached two neighborhood Muslim merchants, asking them if they needed help. Could he give them shelter? My grandmother doesn't know what her grandfather was thinking, the mental calculus crunching away in his head, but he said yes. Yes, knowing the disastrous consequences for the two men if they were caught. Yes, knowing the possible violence his family would potentially face from their co-religionists if word got out.

Sheltering hunted minorities in the face of religious violence was no easy task. Gopal Chandra was the head of a large household, comprising about two dozen family members and a number of servants. He had to think fast. If word got out that their household was sheltering Muslims, the house might be attacked by angry Hindu mobs. And he couldn't trust the servants to keep mum. He needed a plan.

Gopal Chandra led the two men into an unused room upstairs, usually left locked. They were cautioned to remain absolutely silent. Late every night, after the servants had gone to bed downstairs, the door was quietly opened so the men could be let out and fed. Most families in the area were living on very limited rations, but the Gangulys was better off than their neighbors. A friendly local merchant, fleeing to a safe area, had given them some extra food before he left, his last gift to a family that had treated him well.

The two men remained hidden away in the unused room as anti-Muslim riots raged. Ten days later, the violence died down and Gopal Chandra Ganguly bid the men goodbye as they fled to safety. My great-great-grandfather's story wasn't exceptional. A people's history of South Asia is filled with these tiny acts of solidarity across communities, at times of peace and crisis.

If I'm ever so tested, I hope to be able to show the same kind of courage under fire, standing up to personal and community prejudices.

Sadly, I am tested every single day, with critical issues of life and death, injustice and war, where I can safely respond without needing to make these difficult decisions, just by exercising my basic democratic rights and wielding my checkbook in the richest country on the planet. I sometimes do a little, but my great-great-grandfather's story challenges me to do more, to take greater risks, in the battle to be human.

It's Tuesday night, 9:30 pm. I'm in Shinjuku, Tokyo, heading back home from a bookstore. It's late and rainy, and the path's a bit confusing, so I ask a fellow pedestrian in my mangled travel Japanese to point me to the train station. He does so, indicating that he's headed that way himself. We walk together, taking a shortcut to get out of the rain, navigating through a lonely section of the huge underground arcade.

Finally, I see a third person walking nearby. A fourth, a fifth. And then suddenly, the number explodes. I see twenty people around me. A hundred. Two hundred. And I'm moving in a giant sea of humanity toward the train station entrance, a human millipede in motion.

We whiz through the fare gates, a solid block of mostly-black-clad flesh. This is like having all of Heathrow packed into a single train station. There must be over ten thousand people passing through here, just in the areas where I'm walking. It reminds me of that moment at the end of large concerts or sporting events where everyone's heading out in the same direction at once. But this isn't peak rush hour -- it's hours in, and the people are still coming, hordes of tired office workers heading home, young people, shoppers, and the very occasional foreigner or woman in a kimono to keep things interesting. Some carry dripping umbrellas, others walk in wet jackets, while others just look damp. The noise of our collective footsteps and occasional conversation reverberates, a continuous companion as we make our way forward.

Very soon, most of us will have made our way to the right platform and crowded into trains which get emptier and emptier at every successive station, as Tokyo's huddled masses yearning to get home disembark, looking forward to a good night's sleep.

I have chills. This is what a megacity feels like.

While traveling by sea from the US to Japan, we discovered the officers' pool of DVDs; unfortunately for us, most were in German, as might be expected for the primarily-German officers. Then one of the Filipino crew members shared with us his personal stash of English language movies. As we sometimes do while flying, we ended up watching movies that we wouldn't normally think of watching at home.

Among these was Fireproof, a drama about a man responding to a failing marriage, combining Lifetime Original Movie aesthetics with Christian right values. I came in expecting to see pure dreck, but was surprised to see that it wasn't as bad as I'd expected. (Hooray for low expectations.)

The movie

Big-time Christian right media guy Kirk Cameron plays Caleb, a firefighter who saves lives on the job, but can't make his marriage work at home. (Pause for groans.) Caleb's an effective leader at work, but at home, is an angry misogynist, unable to communicate or schedule, unwilling to help around the house, and stashing cash away to buy a boat instead of applying it to household needs. His wife, Catherine, spends weekends with her ailing mom, who needs $25,000 of medical supplies. Both husband and wife are culturally-Christian white Southerners, though neither are particularly devout.

Caleb pressures Catherine to seek a divorce, resisting a friend's suggestion to try counseling. Caleb's dad asks him to hold off on a divorce till he tries the "love dare," a 40-day plan on how to be nicer to your partner. Caleb reluctantly gives it a try, but after years of mistreatment, Catherine's not having any of the look-honey-I-made-you-coffee-please-don't-divorce-me routine, and starts flirting with a friendly doctor at the hospital where she works.

As Caleb's frustration grows, his born-again dad starts barraging him, insisting that he can't fix his relationship until he embraces Christianity. His best friend, also Christian, tries to convince him that marriage is for life, and that there's never a reason for divorce. Stressed and vulnerable, Caleb agrees to turn to Jesus, at which point his self-esteem and self-control shoot up. Catherine comes to trust the reformed Caleb again after she discovers that he's liquidated his Boat Fund to buy medical supplies for his mother-in-law. After apologies and hugging, they renew their marriage vows, reframed as a religious covenant marriage.

1. What the Christian Right and Communists have in common

Fireproof is a cultural product stemming from a larger Christian right concern about real family living. I appreciated seeing its emphasis on building stronger relationships. To the extent that I identify as being part of a relatively secular left, I don't see a lot of institutions around me focusing on the whole person, politically and personally. Instead, there's a patchwork quilt of organizations and institutions, whose ideologies may or may not match.

Compared to that, singular religio-political ideologies are certainly more effective at caring for a whole person. Maybe that's why the only left movement I can think of comparable to the Christian right is early- and mid-20th century socialist/communist spaces, with their own day care, night schools, newspapers, theater, etc. For those of us who don't want to live in a cultural bubble (either Communist or Christian-right), life's harder, though perhaps richer, for lack of ideologically-linked sets of institutions trying to take care of the whole person.

2. A progressive Fireproof

Here's my vision of what Fireproof might look like in my vision of a marginally more progressive America.

• In the movie, Catherine's biggest stressor is being a caregiver to her aging and disabled parents, and the financial stress of being unable to buy her mother medical supplies like a wheelchair and better bed. I'd prefer to live in a more compassionate society where Catherine's mother has a higher standard of in-home care, and access to the medical supplies she needs. No senior citizen should have to wait for her son-in-law to find Jesus before regaining mobility.

• Caleb and Catherine should have easy access to high-quality counseling services at free or low cost. It's not clear to me that Caleb would have taken it up, but Catherine, in particular, seems like the kind of person who'd make use of and hopefully benefit from it.

Now I'm not suggesting that institution of mainstream progressive health care policies would have meaningfully changed the arc of the story, or eliminated the difficulty of working through a tough spot in a marriage. But they would have removed some of the stress, helped make sure Catherine's family was being taken care of, addressed the hard financial realities, and hopefully made dealing with the situation a little easier.

(And how do you pay for that? Personal taxes are possibly part of the mix, so maybe in my scenario, it'd be harder for Caleb to save up for a boat. Me? I'm willing to inconvenience boat owners a bit to see senior citizens taken care of. Caleb's a government official who performs heroic work saving lives. If we can come together to have collective fire protection, we can do the same for medical supplies and mental health services.)

3. Why God?

Taking the premise of the movie as-is, I'm still puzzled as to why the movie needed to be about God, and why the characters couldn't have come to a similar outcome (resolution of long-standing marital problems) in an religiously agnostic context.

• Caleb wasn't particularly religious through much of the film. While Caleb's born-again father's advice was Biblically-based, Caleb explicitly ignored the Biblical basis for much of the movie. It's not clear to me why he couldn't have done that for just a bit longer, through the end of the film.

• At a low point, Caleb's father pressured him to accept Jesus. This seems like a low blow, and a bit cult-ish, preying on his son's weaknesses at his time of need. I don't see how a couple of really good conversations couldn't have gotten Caleb out of his funk, instead of dad lecturing his stressed-out son about how "you've been spitting at Jesus."

• Catherine seems to have signed up for Caleb's Christian program only after declaring that whatever it was that was making him a better husband, she wanted to share in that too. That's not a religious conversion. If Caleb had told her that he'd been helped by therapy, the movie might have ended with the two of them hugging at the therapist's office, instead of doing a public religious covenant ceremony. Heck, if Caleb had been inspired by Islam instead of Christianity, one gets the sense that Catherine may have been tolerant of that as well, as long as it got the job done.

4. In defense of divorce

Caleb's best friend's insistence that marriage is for life is creepy. I'm very happily married, hopefully for life, but feel better knowing that being together is a happy choice, not an oppressive religious obligation. Divorce can be a healthy and appropriate option. I fear that Caleb's best friend would be anti-divorce even in the face of deeply abusive relationships ("your husband beats you up? try some counseling, and pray harder -- divorce is sinful").

5. The Suburban South

I don't see a lot of movies set in an integrated contemporary suburban South. For all I know, that where the plurality of Fireproof's American viewers live. I still enjoyed the setting, as a reminder of our country's diversity.

6. Separation of church and state

One of the aspects of the movie I liked best was the way that it showed sympathetic characters operating within a Christian right frame in a world where there's a separation of church and state, and yet the characters seem to do just fine, never needing to resort to theocratic solutions.

Caleb's workplace includes Christians and atheists, who get along very well. A few of the firefighters discuss religion and values in their personal time, but without feeling any need to institutionalize it. Catherine's coworkers never explicitly out their religious affiliations or discuss issues of faith, and yet they're portrayed as perfectly reasonable people.

At the end of the movie, Caleb and Catherine choose to get a re-commitment ceremony, framed as a covenant marriage, layering their personal religious beliefs on top of the basic marriage document. This is very significant, indicating that the characters want something beyond the legal institution of marriage, and are able to celebrate that cultural and religious meaning without trying to redefine everyone else's marriages by making divorce harder to access legally. Caleb and Catherine's world may be consistent with same-sex marriage, no-fault divorce, community property, and equal legal rights for men and women. Where their views deviate from minimum legal norms, they ultimately seem able to take responsibility for themselves, living in a pluralistic society without demanding special rights for themselves, or asking others to give up theirs.