Touch (2012) – 1×05 – Norah goes driving
» Part 1 (Part 2)
So today (the 26th of September in 2017), the Saudi king finally finally issued a decree allowing women to get driving licenses and I wanted to share, of all things, a clip from a TV show that aired five years ago.
Though it says Pakistani-American on my bio, not a lot of people know that I actually spent the formative years of my childhood in Saudi Arabia. I loved it there, since we left right before I entered my teens and I never faced the same restrictions older girls and women did.
But when I look back, so much of what I remember now is the ways in which the inequalities were sponged up. It didn’t need to be outright said, it was just so apparent. When I visited Pakistan and the US during summer vacations and saw women driving, what I would wonder is: wow, I wonder when they started to allow that. It wasn’t until years later that it struck me that it didn’t need to be allowed, it was simply a freedom offered to all.
That kind of thinking warps everything. If they can’t drive, they can’t pilot. How would they get to work? Take their kids anywhere? Go grocery shopping? It was such a major thing that was deprived from them and would affect the way people thought. Imagine what girls and boys growing up would think.
In between shows where he storms around threateningly, Kiefer Sutherland was in an oddball little show called Touch. Each episode would connect a bunch of seemingly random stories across the world into one thread by the end of it, and while the main plot dragged, the mix of an autistic child with special powers and conspiracy theories, the different stories could be pretty interesting, allowing a little glimpse into different cultures and people and! Using the native language with subtitles where it’d make sense.
The clip above is from one episode where a Saudi girl wants some freedom for a while. That’s all there is to it. But it was pretty affecting and I wanted to gif or post it in some way and it remained on my list for years until today felt like the day to share it. 🙂