Figments Of Imaginations

Slumdog Millionaire has swept away the Oscars and made its unknown cast superstars overnight. In spite of such achievements Slumdog has been severely criticized by not just Indian critics but also by a section of the Indian film fraternity.

Many of them believe that because Slumdog depicted the poverty of India and stamped the prejudiced opinion of the West about India it was able to win over the jury. In other words Slumdog showed the gora chamdi wala’s what they wanted to see. Such an argument is not entirely untrue. This year Sean Penn won the best actor award and was truly surprised for having "wrestled" past the come back kid. On receiving his award he even commented “You homo loving sons of guns”, clearly advocating the academy’s basis towards gay right movies. May be poverty also greatly appeals to them.

But curse Slumdog as much as you want for not portraying the “shining” India but one cannot overlook the fact that the rising and shining of new India is being depicted thoroughly in main stream Indian cinema, may be a tag bit too much.

When was the last time that a big banner bollywood flick that its lead protagonist as a poor guy? Sure the cinema of 70’s had an Amitabh Bachchan born into poverty, cheated by the system who finally defying the system and becoming the angry young man. But cut across to today and invariably you will find the lead man to be born into a rich north Indian family who instead of attending class in college roams around with the hottest chick in campus but soon after campus fit into the family business earning the laurels of one and all.

sadly all the big banners have a pattern. The Yash Chopra camp picturises its movies in beautiful Punjab where everyone has huge kotharis and acres of fertile farm lands. Karan Johar makes movies for the NRIs in places where you will find NRIs . UTV which till now was a breath of fresh air is kind off following the same path with movies where the “hero” does nothing for a living.

Farhan Akhtar is many times credited to make movies for the youth of this country. But even in his work the artists are from metros living a very comfortable life(on their dad’s money off course).

I hail from a fairly affluent family, but even then it was ingrained into me and all my friends fairly early that we being from the service class and being born in India had to struggle. Studies if not everything in my household was given importance and no one ever( especially my parent) cut me any slack. Even my friends from business families knew that they had to be shrewd to succeed. This obviously does not mean that we followed our parents’ advice like the holy gospel or that our childhood was deep ingrained in books. We had our share of fun, our share of papers were flunked, our share of unparliamentary activities were committed but there was always a level to which we were allowed to screw up, and we were well aware of it. But do our directors portray it in their work. You yourself are the best judge.

Some may argue that we live our fantasies, our dreams through the silver screen. Thus they are allowed to be larger than life. That is true if you consider cinema only as a form of entertainment but given the fact that we are born in the multimedia generation and have successfully traded books with electronic media as our primary pass time, the highly influential world of Indian Cinema needs to become a bit realistic and cannot simply be the figments of imaginations of a chosen few.