Thank You Yet Again, Mr Rushdie

Last year, well before the now-ubiquitously adored Slumdog Millionaire was released, I promised myself that I would not add to the general hysteria. There were two reasons for it: the film promised to push every ideological and political button I have (for the record, it does!); and second, having followed similar mass marketing exercises about India before, I knew that all dissenting voices would be shouted down.

I wasn't wrong. The western media juggernaut has been extraordinary in hyping the film, but also at silencing all alternative opinion about the film. Much of British and American media in any case refuses to let an Indian writer/journalist comment on issues linked to India: our best hope recourse is to get a generally clue-less British-Indian or Indian-American holding forth in a manner that consistently repeats the immigration myth that so many of us from the South Asian subcontinent detest: "West is better, richer, modern; back home is poor, superstitious, backward."

The motives boldly ascribed to such criticism has been simplistic and offensively - albeit cleverly - racially coded: any criticism of the film by Indians must be rooted in nationalist pride and a corollary inferiority complex. And worse still, publications and journalists have declared with complete hubris and ignorance that of course Indians don't make such real movies because they would rather make and watch "escapist Bollywood fare." And to hell with the hundred years of Do Bigha Zameen, Traffic Signal, Chameli, and a hundreds of well made, mainstream, successful Bollywood films about the country's underbelly. Who cares about facts when the white man has spoken!

When the screen legend - and in my mind, one of the few Indians with the credibility and stature - to make the point, mildly took issue with the film, he was pilloried. Western journalists who knew little of Bachchan's trajectory and work, declared that he was "jealous" because he hadn't been included in the film; that he was a has-been; that he was delusional. Under the onslaught, Bachchan withdrew his very valid although poorly formulated remarks.

Which is why I am so grateful for Salman Rushdie's piece today in the Guardian. And once again must thank him for saying what many of us have wished to say but have known that it shall be shouted down, mocked, dismissed:

"What can one say about Slumdog Millionaire, adapted from the novel Q&A by the Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup and directed by Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan, which won eight Oscars, including best picture? A feelgood movie about the dreadful Bombay slums, an opulently photographed movie about extreme poverty, a romantic, Bollywoodised look at the harsh, unromantic underbelly of India - well - it feels good, right? And, just to clinch it, there's a nifty Bollywood dance sequence at the end. (Actually, it's an amazingly second-rate dance sequence even by Bollywood's standards, but never mind.) It's probably pointless to go up against such a popular film, but let me try.

The problems begin with the work being adapted. Swarup's novel is a corny potboiler, with a plot that defies belief: a boy from the slums somehow manages to get on to the hit Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and answers all his questions correctly because the random accidents of his life have, in a series of outrageous coincidences, given him the information he needs, and are conveniently asked in the order that allows his flashbacks to occur in chronological sequence. This is a patently ridiculous conceit, the kind of fantasy writing that gives fantasy writing a bad name. It is a plot device faithfully preserved by the film-makers, and lies at the heart of the weirdly renamed Slumdog Millionaire. As a result the film, too, beggars belief.

It used to be the case that western movies about India were about blonde women arriving there to find, almost at once, a maharajah to fall in love with, the supply of such maharajahs being apparently endless and specially provided for English or American blondes; or they were about European women accusing non-maharajah Indians of rape, perhaps because they were so indignant at having being approached by a non-maharajah; or they were about dashing white men galloping about the colonies firing pistols and unsheathing sabres, to varying effect. Now that sort of exoticism has lost its appeal; people want, instead, enough grit and violence to convince themselves that what they are seeing is authentic; but it's still tourism. If the earlier films were raj tourism, maharajah-tourism, then we, today, have slum tourism instead. In an interview conducted at the Telluride film festival last autumn, Boyle, when asked why he had chosen a project so different from his usual material, answered that he had never been to India and knew nothing about it, so he thought this project was a great opportunity. Listening to him, I imagined an Indian film director making a movie about New York low-life and saying that he had done so because he knew nothing about New York and had indeed never been there. He would have been torn limb from limb by critical opinion. But for a first world director to say that about the third world is considered praiseworthy, an indication of his artistic daring. The double standards of post-colonial attitudes have not yet wholly faded away."

Thank you, Sir Salman!

Random, Pointless but Totally Fun on a Lazy Sunday

I should thank The Buddha Smiled for pointing me to the most ridiculously fun idea for a lazy Sunday morning. Its The Hero Factory, a website that allows you to make up your own super-hero alter-ego.

Mine is posted herewith. I wanted something a bit tougher but in the interest of complete honesty went with the first result! The "whipped" bit worries me a bit, but oh well, guess even super-heroines have bad days....

At least it cheered me up!!!

Panties, Pubs and Protests

A couple of years ago, a friend was on a business trip from Delhi and we decided to head out to Brighton for the weekend. Not, mind you, because Brighton was particularly attractive but because she had read about the place in all those old English romance novels. Then a couple of other friends - also from Delhi and travelling through the UK - joined us. Finally, there were about half dozen Indian women, all in our thirties and forties, who hit Brighton night-life on a balmy summer Saturday.

Many drinks later, while sitting out on the hotel balcony, my friend turned around and asked, "When we met all those years ago, could you have imagined we would ever do this?"

Her eyes were wide with wonder. And perhaps just a dash of tears. Nostalgia or perhaps just too many gin and tonics.

All of us knew exactly what she meant. We had all grown up in small towns in India in conservative families. Most of us did not count as the colonial elite, separated from that echelon by economy and politics. Perhaps, out of the group, I had the most international upbringing, more thanks to my father's government job rather than any active parental choice. Many of the women on that balcony had been brought up with limited dreams: go to university, get a (respectable!) job, get married and raise a family.

But we had fought hard to find new dreams, and then to make them come true. Every woman on that balcony had forged a brilliant career, often rising to the top against all odds in her chosen field. There were extra-marital and pre-marital sex, divorces, schisms with the family, travails of being a single mother in fairly conservative society that linked us all together. We had rebelled and we had survived.

And through out it all, even ten years ago, we could never have imagined that motley group of friends could ever manage (or even afford to) travel overseas, shop, party, bond, just live on our terms!

We - from the generation born in the 60s and 70s - were lucky to grow up in times of tumultuous change. The choices we had made would have been impossible for our mothers. The country's steadily improving economics through out our lifetimes has meant that we can have careers that could not have been imagined even in our own adolescent years. We are the first fortunate ones.

Just as the ones who have followed are the next generation. They are products of an era that can push the boundaries of change further. My mother's generation had to choose between studying science and arts: "tradition" decreed that "good" girls studied arts, especially since science involved "mingling" with boys. My generation fought to wear jeans and "western" clothes because "good traditional" girls didn't wear those. And now the next generation is fighting to be hold hands publicly with their partners, to travel safely on public transport with their friends of a different gender (instead of curtailing their movements), and for the right to unwind in a public space after a hard day's work. Same war, different battle.

The weapons of this new battle are different too. Our generation struggled mostly alone, enlisting help from friends and family, but rarely a larger like-minded community. Our battles were often fought with cunning, secrecy, never fully and openly challenging the cultural and moral thekedaars of our society. When we made our choices, we knew we would take the consequences and prepared for them: we went home early so as to be "safe," walked the streets armed with a hockey stick, learned martial arts. And somewhere deep inside, we hid the quiet despair of having to fight for what our male counterparts took for granted.

No more. The current battle has been taken to the moral thekedaars: on facebook, by internet, in pubs and across the world. The pink panties protest is an apt response to the attempts at terrorising innocent young women for daring to choose their own lifestyles.

It is particularly effective tactic because for many decades, the foul-mouthed moral thekedaars have used vile language to intimidate and disgust us. Many of us have chosen to ignore their disgusting language and actions. And they have constantly benefitted from the idea of "good" Indian women - who are too "delicate" and "well-bred" to engage with their thuggish tactics. Their formulation of "good Indian women" (the ones who don't take them on) vs the "westernized bad" ones (the ones who will) has long helped them dominate and control the discourse about women in the country.

The Pink Chaddi campaign has only just begun to change that dynamic. Finally Indian women have begun to claim space on the political turf: once the moral police crossed that final line of maryaada, there is nothing wrong with using knickers - pink or otherwise - to shame, horrify and fight them.

One final word: the moral thekedaars have already shown themselves ignorant of history of India and its traditions. Seems that despite their delusions of religiosity, they are also as ignorant of religion, especially Hinduism. Otherwise they would realise that the time of Sita and Draupadi is well over; the time of Durga and Kali begins now!