Chicago Blues

This blog is an online repertoire of my columns that run in the Indian Express, North American edition. Here I rave and rant about life, mostly as seen from the large vistas of my little world.

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Location: Chicago, United States

Friday, December 21, 2007

On or off the “Inde” Platform?




While the so-called bigwigs of Indian filmdom are busy settling recently sparked feuds from the low-key invite list to the Abhi-warya wedding, two of the three most popular women in the business, even if slightly off by a tangent, are cooling their heels from hot controversies their films have stirred up lately. While media coverage of anything to do with Indian movies and stars usually makes page three material, these proceedings have made it to the front-page headlines, breaking all “kosher-curry,” and “star-o-typical” barriers.

So what if the rest of the world cannot tell a “Bend it Like Beckam” apart from a “Monsoon Wedding”? Deepa Mehta has taken a part of the same world by storm with “Water,” but everything about the polemical making of the movie was conveniently sidelined; given that its singled-out actors, what they wore to the Oscars, and who accompanied them, were milked dry to the limit of their thrill-yielding potential by the media. But what of the essence of the story, its reflection on the low ranks allocated to women in ancient Indian society? All the movie itself has gotten is backlash from Hindu fundamentalists back in India, who were angered by what they say are historical inaccuracies and unnecessary exaggeration of lesser-known facts. And more recently, Mira Nair’s adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Namesake” has opened up a rusty old iron curtain on the quintessential immigrant experience --- of feeling detached in a foreign land, coming to terms with the distinct nuances that dichotomize them from the natives, and so forth. Again, the media has unabashedly puffed up Nair’s endeavor by labeling it evidence of the current rage of “Diaspora Dandy” creating waves in the Western world; although for a part of the diaspora, it may seem to bear a rather droning, sluggish effect.

As a part of the movie-fanatic diaspora that is often plagued by the issue of what really constitutes the big idea of biculturalism, I can unreservedly say that these moviemakers, being the ellipsis in this map-notion don’t seem to help a great deal, nor do the media, with their rather sly, shifting applications. Most movies made by these crossover filmmakers concentrate on a rather non-progressivist image of various sections of the Indian population, and more often than not, the people depicted in them are a confused NRI lot, some stinking-rich, while others, good old struggling-straggling middleclass. For instance, in “Bend it Like Beckham,” the gumption of an Indian girl and her family’s support to her in her Beckam-isque pursuits, that came by eventually, were depicted as an Indian tradition, which was only yet changing. In “Bride and Prejudice,” the ending was a compromised, happy, near-perfect union. But not before the radical, plebeian Indian heroine chastised a “gora” businessman, (before he saved her from big trouble, and consequently, wooed her), by telling him in her typical essentialist tone that brown-skinned women like her needn’t be looked down upon as mere second-rate images of Western gratifications. And then, there was “Mistress of Spices” - a movie based on Chitra Divakaruni’s novel, which basically brought out the slave in the Indian woman. Slave, of spices, the kitchen, and the general liability of homemakerly onuses, a long-standing mold, which even the most modern of divas haven’t been able to break out of. In essence, most of these “Hinglish” films continue to focus on and grapple with monotonous issues of “lineage,” “traditionalism,” and "identity crisis,” as was seen in a series of the diaspora films, like “American Desi,” “Green Card Fever,” “Flavors,” “American Chai,” which simply don’t cut it anymore. And it doesn’t help when the media focus on where these movies are being filmed, who fought whom on the sets, or whose fashion faux pas was caught on a random camera phone, rather than the issues that need to be addressed.

Occasionally, movies like “Black Friday,” or “Kabul Express” come along, but duly get lost in the glare of a non-monsoon, “desh ki sabse badi shaadi,” buildup, or the new-fangled hairdo of an actor at an award ceremony. Further, when Madhur Bhandarkar comes up with a “Traffic Signal,” it gets disregarded because of a mainstream movie shot in the modish gridlocks of New York city, where extra-marital affairs (God forbid the Hindu fundamentalists get an inkling of that!) loom.

So, amidst images of the pinked-hype surrounding the subject of homosexuality in “When Kiran Met Karen,” and repetitive snatches of a 30 second post-wedding footage of Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai that define new heights in cosmopolitalism-lined, gossip-for-profit media culture, the true-blue NRI segment is left with no choice than to deflect from acute transnational issues that solicit their attention, and look out for a skimpily clad Rakhi Sawant being ousted on a substandard reality TV show, or wait tolerantly as the media scrape the bottom of the Richard-Gere-necks-Shilpa-Shetty stories barrel.

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