In 2007 I traveled to Bangladesh for a month visiting with garment workers, sharing bowls of rice on the floor in their ramshackle apartments, playing cricket in the streets with their kids, teaching aunts and uncles how to play ultimate Frisbee, and most of all I listened.
Acts of terrifying violence and appalling humiliation are suddenly illumed by slivers of hope – expressed by the naked, skeletal prisoners in acts of unexpected generosity (the sharing of a rice ball or a joke) – and a central love story.
The Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian theory gives a natural explanation to the sharing of japonica rice by the Sino-Tibetans and Austronesians.
Not much really happens in Midi Z's film, and yet in one engrossing scene after another, we observe the minute details that define life for these men: hacking doggedly away at rocks in their Kappa tracksuit bottoms and Real Madrid socks, arguing about pubic hairs in their shared bowls of rice and fatty pork, listening to the radio, and trying to get some sleep in their cramped, shared quarters.
They sat on the bare floor, sharing a meal of rice, noodles, and fish stew.
The groups sat together on the park's patchy grass, sharing large plates of rice, raisins and lamb.
By 10am in the upmarket district of Maitama, in the capital, Abuja, market-seller Maimuna Mohammed had unrolled her woven mat and was sharing a meal of rice and stew with two other voters.
Still, after school he felt tired and overwhelmed, sharing a dinner of rice and okra with his brothers before retiring to the living room to pass the evening hours studying.
And to prove his point, his humanity, he went to live among the people he wrote about - in a lean-to room in the desperate shanty towns of Lagos, sharing a handful of rice with the starving subsistence farmers of the Sahel - and tried to tell the stories of their emerging countries as they might have told them.
India and Vietnam increased their share of global rice exports as a result, overtaking Thailand as the world's largest rice exporter.
