Mail Today
February 7, 2009
There is good porn and there is bad porn, just as there is good and bad cinema, music and books.
Trust me. As a Malayali male, my rites of passage involved the midday ritual of steamy sex on celluloid in libidinous halls. The discerning audience always categorised the skin show into good, bad and the ugly.
Those in the last category would have a sea of skin, so repulsive that we would be reduced to tears bemoaning the huge waste of the actor’s assets, producer’s raw stock, and our meagre pocket money.
Then, there was plenty to choose.
Incidentally, Roman Polanski was introduced to us in one of those many surreptitious lunchtime servings and was immediately rated high for the economy of skin and aesthetics of desire ( this particular one was rechristened for the local lusty viewer and happened so long ago that it has to remain unnamed).
If Slumdog Millionaire is poverty porn, then with all the collective authority of the old midday audiences I would slot it in the last category of the very ugly. The director has thrown crap at the audience to show crap. Surely it is a crappy movie. It is not the one painfully long portrayal of the shitting of the miserably poor Indian that riles the audience, but it’s terribly superficial account of real India, if there is one.
Everything here is real: the glitzy sets of chat shows; the poor carpenters and masons who cycle for hours to reach the work- places to make those sets; the TV hostess who raves and rants about poverty to splash in a bathtub of champagne later; her janitor who might have run away from vigilante rapists of Jharkhand or Chhattisgarh.
The movie has some bits of real India, like the Dharavi, the Bollywood, the ‘ chaiwala’, the BPOs, the insensitivity of the middle classes, the irreparable breach between the rich and the poor, and the urban and the rural. But real India is each of this and all of this put together and much more. That is why very few outsiders could crack the Indian code and get underneath the skin of Indianness.
Diversity
Why outsiders, often south Indians who stay in the north live a life of sanctimonious seclusion rejecting the north Indian other. Very few north Indians settle down in the south and when they do, they are often an oddity in the neighbourhood.
Each state for that matter has its own ethos distinct from another and unless you give up the Freudian Id of your very special identity you remain an outsider, who fails to enjoy the joys and sorrows of being native.
The movie hasn’t even made a decent attempt to reflect this great Indian contradiction. But the shocking bit is about the bunch that is celebrating the movie as if the best that could have happened to India is an Oscar for this movie.
The cheerleaders seem to be as cut off from their neighbourhood as Dev Patel in Dharavi. They are desperately seeking merit where none exists. Forget about the movie being a slapstick satire on Bollywood, forget about the wooden flat characters who are pathetic, forget about AR Rahman’s less than brilliant music ( among his recent numbers Azeemoshah Zehanshah… and Khwaja Meri Khawaja… of Jodha Akbar are distinctly superior), how could the celebrity chorus condone the soulless condescension of the director? Yes, those who cheer the movie are also part of the mindboggling mosaic that is real India and, that is the puzzle that needs to be solved.
Deprivation
A few years ago, a member of the Rajya Sabha intervening in a debate on farmers’ suicides told the house that nobody nowadays bothered about parentage. He wasn’t abusing the august assembly. His thesis was: we are all children of farmers several times removed from the farm and its shitting corners and the more we forget that, the more deprived our poor cousins will be.
Poverty is so alien to the new Indian middle class today that its response to Slumdog cannot be different from that of audiences in the western world. These viewers partake in the globalised disdain for poverty and end up celebrating the misery of the less fortunate in callous cinema. A boy squatting to shit and getting covered in crap while seeking an autograph is as much a tickling novelty for them as it would be for somebody in London or Los Angeles.
So, it is the exotica of deprivation that enthralls them. Those who have enthusiastically endorsed this movie have done so because the movie is not about the India that they inhabit, not about ‘ people like us’. They relate more to the British moviemakers and their audiences and would have always felt a little out of place in Delhi or Mumbai, far away from London. They speak the language language of Dharavi or Yamuna Pushta only to talk down to their maids, drivers, peons, ‘ chaiwala’, or some leader of the unwashed masses who is new to the circuit. In short, the loud cheer for Slumdog has only exemplified the dirty gutter that separates the two Indias.
This breach existed all along, but what is strikingly new is the confidence with which they root for something like Slumdog. Earlier, however much the East India Company pensioners might have wanted to endorse Katherine Mayo’s Mother India , one snide comment from old man Gandhi had shut them all up. But now, the celebration of another drain inspector’s flawed report is being touted as the nation’s “ maturity”.
Wealth
Have we really come of age by throwing crap at the ‘ chaiwala’ and by theorising that we are like this only — we keep shitting at those down below in the shithole? This exhibition of a vulgar middle class cockiness is new.
A generation ago, even feudal lords ( of course, outside Bihar) used to be ashamed of seeing themselves in the mirror, as in Benegal’s Ankur or any number of similar great ones in other Indian languages.
A movie can’t hurt, sure; that too by a Brit who doesn’t know anything of the country. But what hurts is the supra culture of vanity of wealth masquerading as maturity. That makes one wonder whether the new role models ought to be property brokers of Gurgaon or Ghaziabad who have recently become ‘ developers’. After all, they too have imported SUVs, their children study in expensive schools, and some of them have even launched TV channels.
The new developers of middle class suburbia, indeed deserve to be feted along with the other worthies who have made this movie. After all, they make plush buildings for the nouveau riche, whose byproducts are the slums all around. All those migrant labourers who build the dream homes, then live and shit in the neighbourhoods that are walled off.
Every such developer should be given a Padma Shri since the Academy of Motion Arts doesn’t recognise their contribution to Indian art and slum development.
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