{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.04519774011299435, 'fraction_numerical': 0.01493139628732849, 'mean_word_length': 4.595936794582393, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
“We Are Here to Stay”: Pashtun Migrants in the Northern Areas of Pakistan . By Matthias Weinreich. pp. 119. Berlin, Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2009.

Roberge is undoubtedly a humane writer, and this shines through his pieces. For instance, in “Humanism in Ray’s cinema”, an intelligent appraisal of western critics’ decades of labelling of Ray as a ‘humanist’, he comments: “Tenderness as in Renoir, lucidity as in Chekhov and hope as . . . in Ray. These are, I believe, the three main components of Satyajit Ray’s humanism” (p. 191). And while writing perceptively on Ray’s final, heartfelt, but under-appreciated, films about corruption, made after he had suffered severe coronary illness, Roberge brings in an apt New Testament quotation from Jesus—almost the only explicitly religious reference in his collection. It refers to the bleak family drama Branches of the Tree (Sakha Prasakha, 1990): “I am the true vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me, with me in him, bears fruit in plenty; for cut-off from me you can do nothing” (pp. 100–101). The book has many flaws, however. Some are relatively trivial: typos and grammatical slips, incorrect dates and a persistent reference to the “West Bengal Famine”, despite the fact that the disaster occurred chiefly in East Bengal. Others are more serious. For example, the characters in Pather Panchali are described as “peasants” (p. 258), when the family are in fact poor Brahmins who survive by reading the scriptures for the wealthy. The citified Salman Rushdie once made the same mistake, but for Roberge, a student of Ray, there can be little excuse. In another chapter written in 2002, he makes much of a stethoscope as a symbol of the artist’s role in society and claims that an actual stethoscope is seen “only twice in Ray’s oeuvre” (p. 54)—when Apu’s sister Durga is fatally ill in Pather Panchali and at the very beginning of An Enemy of the People (Ganasatru, 1989), Ray’s adaptation of Ibsen’s play about a doctor. Yet in The Adversary (Pratidwandi, 1970), a masterpiece that Roberge reviews at length in yet another chapter, there is a long scene with a depressed medical student who wears a stethoscope and moodily applies the instrument to his own body. Ray went to exceptional lengths to be accurate in his films, which is one reason among many for their effortless feeling of real life. Scholars who love his films, such as Roberge, should try to match Ray’s fastidiousness when writing about his oeuvre.