LOS ANGELES -- Major League Baseball marked the 77th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the sport's color barrier on Monday.

Robinson started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947, marking the end of the racial segregation that had relegated Black players to the Negro Leagues for decades.

"Jackie Robinson became the most vilified, targeted subject of verbal abuse and malicious treatment in the sports arena since Jack Johnson had the audacity to become heavyweight champion of the world in 1908," sociologist and civil rights activist Harry Edwards said at Dodger Stadium. "Like Jack Johnson, Jackie Robinson stood alone."

Members of Robinson's family, including his 101-year-old widow, were at ballparks from coast to coast to honor him.

At New York's Citi Field, Rachel Robinson rode in a golf cart to the Mets dugout, where she was given flowers by manager Carlos Mendoza and retired players Mookie Wilson and Butch Huskey -- the last Met to wear Robinson's No. 42.

"She's the legacy of perseverance," said David Robinson, the youngest son of Jackie and Rachel Robinson.

Every team playing Monday wore No. 42 jerseys.

Robinson's life story is particularly poignant to the Dodgers' Dave Roberts, the first manager of Asian heritage and second Black manager to lead a team to a World Series title.

"He had a big burden in his life to be a professional baseball player but to take on all this negativity, this hate towards him, his wife, his kids, and still persevere," Roberts said.

Players and staff from the Dodgers, including Shohei Ohtani, and the Washington Nationals surrounded Robinson's statue in Centerfield Plaza hours before game time in Los Angeles.

"I can't say enough of what Jackie Robinson's meant to not only the Black community but the Hispanic community, as well," Nationals manager Dave Martinez told the group. "He opened the doors for many, many great players, he really did, and he changed the lives of many, including myself. I don't know if I would be here if it wasn't for Jackie. My idol Roberto Clemente definitely, probably, wouldn't have been around."

"He exemplifies what it means to have strength, courage and passion," Martinez said of Robinson.

Reggie Smith, who never played on a losing team in his 13-year MLB career, recalled nervously speaking to Robinson when they were on the same flight from Los Angeles to the East Coast. Smith introduced himself and said Robinson told him, "I know who you are, and I know what you stand for."

"That meant so much to me," Smith told the players. "Whenever there was injustice on that ballfield of any kind, I would speak up because he gave me the courage to be able to do that."

The Dodgers and Nationals also were joined by Ayo Robinson, a granddaughter of Jackie and Rachel Robinson who was born after Jackie's death in 1972. Her father is David Robinson.

"I soak up my grandfather through the experience of others," she said after the ceremony. "The fact that he is still so impactful in our society today means a lot to me as a person, but it means a lot to me as an American, as well."

Smith urged today's MLB players to remember Jackie Robinson and his travails, which included being barred from hotels and restaurants because of his skin color as well as on-field verbal abuse from fans and opposing teams.

"Keep it in mind so that this game can continue to move forward the way that it has over the last years," Smith said, "and be thankful that you're here and you're able to do the things that you do day in and day out."

In related news, former National League Cy Young Award winner Orel Hershiser, the 1988 World Series MVP for the Dodgers, has purchased a painting titled "Grace" that depicts Robinson praying around a dinner table with Martin Luther King Jr. and former Dodgers greats Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe.

Hershiser plans to keep the painting at its current home, the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri.

"I'm honored to be its owner," he said in a statement. "It marks a very important historical time, and it is important to keep this piece where people can learn about this moment."

Artist Dave Hobrecht donated his painting for display at the museum in 2020, but the wooden canvas was damaged during shipment, resulting in a crack that completely detached the bottom portion of the image from the rest.

Hobrecht and museum president Bob Kendrick decided to reframe the piece and keep it the way it arrived.

"Not having a breakable spirit, that's Jackie Robinson," Kendrick said in the statement. "We decided to unveil it with the damage and that it would be a metaphor that beautifully captures what Jackie was all about."

Washington: The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has released the meeting schedule till April 29, which does not include Pakistan's economic review.

According to the details, Pakistan has also made a formal request to the IMF for the next bailout package of six to eight billion dollars.

Apart from this, Pakistan has also requested to send a review mission of the IMF to Pakistan in the next month of May so that the details of the bailout package for the next three years can be decided.

The Executive Board of IMF has released the meeting schedule till April 29, which does not include Pakistan's economic review, while the staff level agreement between Pakistan and IMF was reached on March 20 last month.

With the approval of IMF Executive Board, Pakistan will receive the final tranche of 1.1 billion dollars after which the standby arrangement of $3 billion will end.

It is pertinent to note that a day ago, the IMF had emphasized that prioritizing reforms to revive the Pakistani economy is more important than getting a new loan package.

The IMF official's comment came after Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb's recent announcement that Pakistan was pursuing a significant and expanded loan package with the IMF.

Pakistan's proposed 24th three-year package with the fiscal fund, if approved, could amount to between $6 billion and $8 billion, which would be the country's largest debt ever.

Monkey Man, a gripping, blood-soaked action film from first-time director Dev Patel, has garnered acclaim for its fight scenes — including, famously, when the main character cuts a man’s throat open by holding the knife in his mouth.

Undergirding all this action, however, is also an attempt at commentary about growing authoritarianism in India, and how political leaders leverage both religion and police to maintain their power.

“Having spent most of my career traveling in and out of India shooting films, it is hard to ignore some of the stories that fill the columns of the newspapers there,” Patel said in a BBC interview. “I wanted to touch on some of that and maybe reach an audience that would never normally access such topics.”

Monkey Man’s debut comes as India navigates its 2024 elections, which the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a chief proponent of Hindu nationalism, hopes to use to maintain its political dominance nationally. Since he came to power in 2014, Modi has acted to suppress political opposition, to undermine the free press, and to discriminate against Muslim people, all efforts that mark what experts describe as a backsliding of the country’s secular democracy.

Monkey Man stops short of critiquing the BJP’s policies explicitly — and in fact reportedly underwent minor changes to avoid doing so. But key plot points levy clear broadsides against India’s current political leaders, Hindu nationalism, and corruption in law enforcement.

Centered on a protagonist known as “Kid” (Patel) seeking vengeance for his mother’s murder at the hands of a brutal police chief (Sikandar Kher), Monkey Man is largely a breakneck action film jam-packed with stunts, gore, and creative uses of fireworks. That Patel was willing to use this forum to make a political statement, however, is significant as the Indian government has cracked down on journalists, freedom of expression, and cinema. Notably, too, Monkey Man goes further than many mainstream Bollywood films, which are unlikely to have such pointed politics — and which at times have even boosted Modi.

Monkey Man’s villains are analogues for contemporary politics

In his efforts to avenge his mother (Adithi Kalkunte), Kid’s chief targets are Rana Singh, the police chief of a fictional city clearly meant to be a stand-in for Mumbai, as well as Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande), the religious leader Singh works for.

Shakti (whose name translates to “power” in Hindi) is depicted as a guru who capitalizes on religious fervor to justify crimes like the land dispossession of minority groups. While not a political leader himself, Shakti is portrayed as the puppetmaster behind a political leader’s operation. Singh, meanwhile, is shown using violence and authority to hurt those with less power and to implement Shakti’s plans.

Given the framing of these characters, Shakti has been perceived by many viewers and critics as an analogue for Modi and key members of the BJP, like Yogi Adityanath, a far-right populist spiritual leader and politician who built his following in part through a fiery, reactionary interpretation of Hinduism. Like Modi, Adityanath has been accused of using his political power to harm minority communities.

Monkey Man takes direct aim at both Shakti and Singh’s characters, with a particularly devastating scene featuring the police destroying Kid and his mother’s village, as the officers seek to clear the land for development under Shakti’s orders. That destruction is followed by Singh’s attempted sexual assault and then violent murder of Kid’s mother, a harrowing attack that fuels the protagonist’s lifelong pursuit of revenge.

While Kid grew up listening to stories about Hindu gods and isn’t Muslim, these developments echo real-life land dispossession that has specifically targeted Muslims in India and been overseen by the state and by police. “Thousands of Muslim families have been forcibly evicted [in the Indian state of Assam] since 2021 from land they had been residing on for decades,” Nazimuddin Siddique writes for Al Jazeera. “Since 2016, police have shot at and killed protesters in at least two instances.”

Modi has also been repeatedly scrutinized for his role in anti-Muslim riots in 2002, which police and government officials did little to stop and which killed 1,200 people in the state of Gujarat. As chief minister of the state at the time, Modi has been accused not only of condoning but inciting this violence. He has been cleared of wrongdoing by Indian courts, but questions about his involvement remain, and were most recently surfaced by a 2023 BBC documentary about the massacre that was censored by the Indian government. In 2005, the State Department barred Modi from a US visit due to concerns about his involvement.

Shakti’s power only grows after the destruction of Kid’s village, and as Monkey Man documents the success of the political party he supports in the film, it also intersperses clips from actual news reports on protests against the rise of anti-Muslim sentiment in India. Shakti at one point also utilizes the Hindi phrase “Bharat Mata ki jai,” which translates to “Long live Mother India,” and is often employed by BJP leaders, including Modi.

For all its efforts to broach this subject, the film’s critiques could be even sharper. When it comes to its depiction of Shakti, the film doesn’t offer many specifics about his ideology, beyond that he abuses the support he receives. And much of the attention in the movie is dedicated to the individual animus Kid has toward Singh, the police officer, rather than the system that he’s a part of.

Some film critics, including Siddhant Adlakha, who wrote a piece for Time, and Prabhjot Bains, who authored a review for But Why Tho, also took issue with how the film employed certain Hindu references.

For Bains, the use of the phrase, “Jai Bajrang Bali,” which praises Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god behind the film’s namesake, contained uncomfortable echoes of how Hindu nationalists have utilized it. This phrase is used by a viewer at a boxing match to support Patel’s character, who is dressed like a monkey.

That same phrase, however, has also been used as a slogan by Hindu nationalists while committing harm against Muslims, Bains writes. For Adlakha, efforts to recast Hindu imagery were also complicated by how they were used to endorse violence.

“The reclamation of such images appears to be Patel’s goal — one he shares with numerous Hindu leaders who have continued to battle Hindu nationalism,” Adlakha adds. “But the use of Hindu imagery as a call to violence, reminiscent of the Hindutva project, is central to Kid’s mission, resulting in narrative dissonance.”

It’s worth noting that the film’s inclusion and celebration of trans people in India, some of whom are part of a community known as hijra, is also significant, directly pushing back on how they have been marginalized by media and in society. In Monkey Man, a group of hijra offer Kid sanctuary, train him in a martial arts montage, and rescue him during an especially pivotal fight scene. Monkey Man’s depictions of the sexual assault and harassment of women also nod at enduring violence that women have experienced in India, drawing more awareness to this ongoing problem.

Despite its shortcomings, it’s nonetheless notable that Patel made political criticism of Indian leaders such a pivotal aspect of the film, especially given the current climate and how heavily studios count on the Indian market. According to Irfan Nooruddin, a professor of Indian politics at Georgetown University, it’s “virtually unheard of” for mainstream films to make such a direct critique of Modi and the BJP.

That’s because film censorship in India has gotten worse in recent years as the BJP has increased scrutiny of art and expression that’s critical of the government. Ahead of April’s election, for instance, Bollywood has released a slew of films that amplify Modi’s agenda. Besides the BBC documentary, other projects — including a film adaptation of Maximum City, a book that nods at Muslim oppression in India, and Gormint, a political satire — have also been tabled by Netflix and Amazon due to what The Washington Post describes as “self-censorship.”

Concerns about this were even clear in Monkey Man itself, which was bought then dropped by Netflix, with some reports suggesting that may have been due to worries about its political content. Even after it was rescued by Universal, there appear to have been changes: In one example, an early trailer showed the banners for the political party in the film as saffron — the color of the BJP. In the final film, some of these banners have been changed to red. And presently, it’s still uncertain if Monkey Man will screen in India at all.

“I don’t see it coming out in India, but if it does it’s not going to come out in one piece,” Adlakha tells Vox, citing likely censorship of violence, sexuality, and politics in the film. “It’s going to be a heavily compromised version.”

There are major threats to India’s democracy

Monkey Man is premiering during a period when experts are worried about the state of India’s democracy and the potential for more erosion.

In a federal election set to begin on April 19, the BJP is expected to maintain its majority in Parliament, wins that could further cement the anti-Muslim positions it employs and its efforts to subvert major institutions like the press and the judiciary.

As Vox’s Zack Beauchamp has written, the BJP rose to power while pursuing “policies undermining Muslim rights and inflaming Hindu anxieties about their Muslim neighbors.” A key law that has raised concern is the Citizenship Amendment Act, which excludes Muslims from neighboring countries from obtaining a fast track to Indian citizenship. That same law allows members of other religious groups including Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, and Christians to expedite their attempts at naturalization.

Both Modi’s and the party’s rhetoric have sought to exploit existing divides between Hindu and Muslim people, including questioning the right of certain Muslims to be in India and alleging that they’re seeking to overtake the Hindu majority by growing their population. One example of this has been fears that the BJP have stoked about the concept of “love jihad,” which alleges that Muslim men are interested in marrying Hindu women in order to establish a larger presence in India.

There’s “a growing sense of fear that a continued run of the BJP is going to bring more laws that are going to really put Muslims in second-class citizenship status,” says Nooruddin.

During Modi’s tenure, there have also been a number of anti-democratic developments, including the increased jailing of opposition, attacks on journalists, media censorship, and the weakening of the judiciary.

In recent weeks, the chief minister of Delhi, a major opposition leader, was jailed shortly before the election on corruption charges he claims are politically motivated. Assaults on the press have also become more common, with police raiding the homes of reporters at a left-leaning publication in 2023, and some mainstream outlets now dubbed “lapdog media” by prominent journalists who call them that for their willingness to dilute critiques on the government. Top political leaders have also tried to diminish the role of the judiciary and to exert greater influence in the selection of judges.

Monkey Man, though imperfect, dares to allude to some of these concerns in a time when even doing that is a risky move.