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"Not everything about Buzkashi is action and danger." September 2010 an exciting docudrama about three Tajik Buzkashi (Ulak-Tartysh/Kökbörü) sportsmen is coming from Oxus Apertura Films. I can't wait to see it. Read more on the official site!

Migrant workers in Moscow

In the Russian section of BBC News, the photographer Yulia Vishnevetskaya publishes a photoblog with the theme "The Photoalphabet - a humourous attempt at codifying the world using pictures".
The acompanying texts are usually not very illuminating (I guess she is, after all, a photographer and not a writer), and I wish she would include place and date more often, but nevertheless her "Photoalphabet" is quite interesting.



The letter Г ("G") stands for Гастарбайтер, migrant workers. Vishnevetskaya visited some Tajik migrant workers building Moscow highrises.


Playing backgammon in their free hours ...


The workers sleep in their barracks in shifts - while one shift is up working, the other is sleeping in the same bunks.


She notes that they are very friendly folks.


They were friendly, she writes, "not only with me, but also with each other - it's surprising how many of them hold hands, and they don't consider it to be anything improper at all".
Hmm, if Vishnevetskaya has travelled as much as she obviously has, why is she wondering about a thing like this? Holding hands among males without being sexually attracted to each other is very common in many different cultures. Or maybe she is only anticipating a likely Russian reaction to such exotic customs ...?

See more photos in the original post.

Racial stereotypes for Soviet policemen

Click to enlarge. This was sent to us by reader Ilshat Nazipov (unfortunately, he didn't include any nice photos of himself ... see his homepage).

It's a diagram of how males of different races in the Soviet Union supposedly look, used by Soviet police to identify nationalities.

It's funny how the 'Tatar' looks just like Lenin, though Tatars weren't such a prominent part of his very mixed ancestry ("Russian, Kalmyk, Jewish, German and Swedish, and possibly others", according to biographer Dmitry Volkogonov.) It's strange that the 'Georgian' doesn't look exactly like Stalin (probably because this was post-thaw, when the Soviet regime had distanced itself from Stalin). I wonder if it's a pure coincidence that the 'Tatar', the 'Jew' and the 'Gypsy' are next to each other. And we suspect that when the artist got to the 'Tajik' and the 'Turkmen', it was already close to deadline or the end of his workday, so he just drew something random - that's why they look a bit more imaginative than the others.

Ainur can't get over how cute the 'Jew' is.

Pan-Asian single of the week: Jonik

Jonik is 28 years old, from Dushanbe, Tajikistan. To the question "About race:" he has replied, "STUPID QUESTION" ("ДУРАТСКИЙ ВОПРОС"). And I can only agree.

Ah, but why such a closely cropped photo ...?