A Canadian Wolverine?
In between worrying about swine flu and wondering how on earth the US Vice-President Joe Biden could say that he wouldn't allow his family to use public transport, I managed to read
this delightful review of X-Men Origins: Wolverine by AO Scott in
The New York Times. I have loved superheroes from the time I was a child but Wolverine went on to become one of my favourite characters. What made him so special? As Scott says in this review, which had me laughing out aloud in the times of swine flu and dreadful bankers: "And now
X-Men Origins: Wolverine, with its ungainly, geeky title and its relatively trim (under-two-hour) running time, helps explain just what makes this guy so intriguing and unusual.
He’s Canadian. "
Who would have thought of that?
Here we go again
On the subject of immigration, continuing from the
last post: the Home Office in the UK started issuing ID cards to foreign nationals from November 2008, a move that I feel reeks of distrust bordering on xenophobia (a whiff of which you first get at the Heathrow airport, where the staff is the rudest and the most condescending to brown Asians standing in the lines for non-EU passport-holders; strangely enough, several of these staff members are themselves brown). Would this document help the UK check illegal immigration, anymore than existing controls will? I have no idea but for the moment, I am somewhat stupified by the number of times the word "fingerprinting" turns up in their documents. Fingerprinting to guard against identity theft, fingerprinting to make sure the person applying for the card is the same as the person on the visa and so on.
Growing up in Kerala, I almost never saw anyone use their thumbprint instead of a signature -- an act signalling a certain "backwardness" that the literate state did not associate with itself. (It's another story that Kerala's literacy movement created 'literates' who could do little more than write their own names but that's for another day.) Fingerprinting was for crooks; if you ended up at a police station for a misdemeanour, you would most likely leave a fingerprint behind that would one day be responsible for your downfall. No wonder then that the British documents leave me uneasy; these come with ugly connotations that somehow seem designed to humiliate. Security seems to be an afterthought, if at all.
In
this piece in the
New Statesman, Sigrid Rausing spells it out clearly: the identity card project is covertly about immigration policy. She writes, "The Home Office is blurring the concepts of “foreign subject” and “illegal immigrant”. It emphasises the importance of “locking down” individual immigrant identities, particularly of “high-risk” groups. This tendentious language trickles down to the detention centres. It sends a message to immigration officials and the police, and to the individuals whose job it is to remove illegal immigrants. The message is simple: Foreign = risk."
Mail & Migrants
I sometimes read the
Daily Mail with horrified fascination. I will be the first to admit that this is a very perverse act. After each article, I tell myself: how could someone actually write this (and boy, do they need better copyeditors!)? But I continue reading to see the levels they stoop to.
A running theme in the
Mail is immigration. The newspapers and its readers are fearful of immigrants, who they thunder, are stealing British jobs and claiming benefits (from their money too, the very cheek of these people!). I see no point of protectionism in a globalised economy but that aside, articles in the
Mail border on xenophobia (and I am being charitable here).
The story I read today is one example. "They're back," the headline screams. No points for guessing who
they are: people from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa, among others, seeking to get into Britain legally or illegally. I imagine the only reason someone would take such terrifying risks to move to another country would be only because of the horrors they have endured in their own homes. But the
Mail is bristling at the thought of all those people at Calais waiting to get in. The French government is even telling them how they can apply for asylum, and "amazingly enough", giving them "food and washing facilities", the newspaper shudders. (As opposed to letting them die of starvation in the cold, preferably unwashed, I imagine.)
It makes me wonder how people are capable of dehumanising to this extent, to be able to think of another human being as such a great threat that he or she is deemed to be unworthy of living. How is it that they think a country, any country, can be destroyed because it has granted a home to someone forced to flee from his own birthplace? Do they not see themselves in these people, wanting, just like they do, a better life for themselves and for their children?
This fear is not something unique to Britain. We see this in India, where there is a continued and similar dehumanisation (and demonisation) of communities, of migrants, of people who were not born in the cities or towns they are living in. There is a constant discussion about how a city's culture is being eroded because of migrants ("oh, they can't even speak Marathi/Kannada/insert other Indian language", no different from "what are all these African/Indian/Asian foodstores doing at my doorstep"), an argument I find the most specious. The people who wail about culture are usually the ones who don't do anything to 'protect' it -- apart from beating up women, that is. Do they send their kids to Marathi-medium schools? Do they patronise Marathi theatre? (And I say Marathi only as an example.)
As for the cost of immigration, I am sure there are ways of discussing the issue that do not involve the use of the words "disapora of the desperate" (whatever that means) or for that matter 'they'. But it would be too much to expect the
Daily Mail to be able to see that.
'Slumdog Millionaire': All that hype and then nothing
Columnist Nirpal Dhaliwal’s comment in
The Guardian that
Slumdog Millionaire could only have been made by a westerner/outsider is absolutely true. Because the movie might be many things but what it isn’t is an insider’s account of India. It offers an outsider’s perspective, focusing on key ingredients that feature in a kind of tourism that has today become popular with people from developed countries: slum tourism. Just as you pay money to gape at the way in which the world’s poorest live, often forced to defecate and eat in the same, tiny living space, you buy a ticket for
Slumdog Millionaire to glimpse a lovingly shot view of certain aspects of Indian life. What it doesn’t offer is the real story, neither of India nor of its poor.
It would have been easy enough to look at, and watch, this film as just another movie. But what is worrying is that it is being described as a romp through the real India, portraying truths that Indian film directors do not dare to depict. This is untrue. For one, when you say Indian cinema, it means much more than Bollywood or Hindi films. As high as Bollywood signboards loom over Indian cinema, it is but one part of the country’s movie industry. There are movies made in regional languages such as Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali and Tamil. There are directors, not just in Hindi films, but also in regional languages, who have focused their camera on unsightly facets of India. And done a far better job than director Danny Boyle, who can only offer a tourist’s viewpoint.
As annoying it is that such an inaccurate depiction of India’s poor, as one sees in
Slumdog Millionaire, is being touted as magnificent and real, it also makes me wonder why this is the case. Satyajit Ray gave us a vivid account of what it is like to be poor in
Pather Panchali. His movie not only showed the indignity of poverty but also a glimpse of what it was to live life as a poor person. The characters in this film, though poor, didn’t spend all their time in being poor or battling the next obstacle that came their way. They also had time to seek happiness in whatever little they had, in the love they had for each other, and in their surroundings. But if one were to watch
Slumdog Millionaire, it would seem as if the poor have no chance to laugh, smile or be happy, caught up as they are in this major, life-consuming task of survival.
This is an unrealistic notion. I imagine that when
Slumdog Millionaire scriptwriter Simon Beaufoy walked around the slums in Bombay, he was shocked and awed by what he saw: the lack of basic facilities such as sanitation or water, the differences between Hindus and Muslims, the squalid one-room tenements with makeshift plastic sheet roofs, each housing as many as ten people, cooking, eating, pissing, sleeping and making love, sometimes all at once. But these same people also laugh, watch movies and television shows, and even -- horror of horrors -- find happiness in just walking on the beach or snacking on bhel-puri. But that does not make for compelling cinema, does it?
It is telling that the one scene in the film that captures interests that Jamal, the movie’s main protagonist, might have had, has been reduced to a moment tailor-made to shock the audience. In this scene, Jamal has been asked to name the actor who starred in a certain movie. He knows the answer because this actor -- who incidentally is none other than the person having a spat with Boyle -- is his favourite. And as a child, he had jumped into a pool of shit to be able to see Amitabh Bachchan, a scene that's captured in all its glory in
Slumdog.
Would Jamal need to rewind this moment to be able to answer that it was Bachchan who starred in a particular film? Wouldn’t he know the answer immediately like most Indians, who turn to Hindi movies to escape the drudgery of their daily lives, where even toilets are a luxury?
I cannot claim to have a complete understanding of the poor or poverty in India. But I spent a considerable amount of time in slums not only in Bombay but also in Delhi and Gujarat (the relief colonies in Gujarat, where Muslim victims of the 2002 riots live, are little better than slums). It is true that people are forced to defecate sitting next to railway lines in Bombay or in the open fields in some of the colonies in Gujarat. It is true that each day is a struggle especially when you are poor, that there are people who molest and maim children on the streets, that these children are forced to steal to live. I met slum children who were smart, crooked and manipulative. But they were also children; they cracked jokes, they laughed, they enjoyed eating sweets and savouries, they knew the incredibly convoluted plots of some of the television soaps aired on cable and followed the story lines closely. You don’t get any of that in
Slumdog, obsessed as it is with presenting a one-dimensional story of India where life is a series of horrors unfolding one after the other (till the inexplicable ending, that is).
I hold no cudgels on behalf of those who feel that India should be portrayed as a brave, beautiful country, where people speak English at call centres and eat pizzas for dinner. There is no one India and a majority of its people live in terrible conditions. That reality should be portrayed but not as a series of vignettes tailored both to shock and to offer some semblance of cohesiveness to the storyline. And if used thus, as it is in
Slumdog, it should not be presented as India’s reality. Because it isn’t.
I would have willingly considered this movie as just another movie. Often after you watch a Bollywood film, you come out of the cinema hall and say, “It was time-pass”. Because that is all you expect of certain films: entertainment. There is no reason to look down on a director who is making what is clearly a silly film set in New York or Sydney; there are people who watch and enjoy such films, and what do you know, some of those people are even poor and live in slums.
Oddly enough, apart from being called realistic,
Slumdog has been touted as being a fairy-tale. I doubt that even for the richest in the world, reality would ever rank side-by-side with fairy-tale on the scorecard but that aside, how is it that Western critics are able to see a movie that features no kind human being (except for one American couple, a point I'll get to later) as a fairy-tale? There is no redemption at least for one of the three main protagonists in the film and there is no romance in the life that they are shown to lead, which only includes taking one hard knock after the other.
It is also appalling that the only kind adults the children encounter are American, even if it’s only in a brief scene. I know that many rich and middle-class Indians, who encounter poor children begging for money everyday at traffic signals, have learnt to erase them altogether from their visual fields. But there are also many who give children chocolates or biscuits or packets of food, something I have seen myself several times. Certainly not as many times as one would like to see but to imagine that the protagonists in the movie live for nearly two decades without encountering one kind Indian soul is something of a stretch (which is to put it mildly).
All that criticism of
Slumdog is without even going into the finer points. For instance, one could ask why an entire quiz would only feature questions that are in some way connected to the protagonist’s life. How would Jamal know the answer to a question on cricket because someone was watching a cricket game on television when he was in the next room? Where in India would
The Three Musketeers, in English, feature in a municipal, primary school’s curriculum? (
The Three Musketeers' reference
is integral to the movie.) I could go on and on but you get the drift.
All that one can overlook in what is typically the Indian way; we say “it’s a movie, after all”; it is possible that the hero can escape recognition by merely placing a huge black mole on his face; it’s possible that not a single bullet will hit the hero even if a machine gun is being fired; it is even possible that when a bullet strikes the hero, it shows consideration by getting out of his head in the least painful manner, and preferably, removes an inconsiderate brain tumour while it’s at it. But none of us would call that movie a realistic portrayal of the hero’s times.
Slumdog Millionaire may win all the awards that’s to win and some more. But it offers no insights, no honesty, and no realities except that which is suitable for carrying the story forward and for impressing and shocking the audience. It is a pity that so many people are trying to make it something that it is not.
Updated to add: I have not read Vikas Swarup's
Q&A, on which the movie is based, but I don't remember fantastic claims being made (at least not similar to what one gets to hear about
Slumdog) that it accurately represents Indian realities. I want to emphasise that my problem is not with
Slumdog Millionaire but with those who claim that the movie offers a realistic portrayal of India.
'The world knew what was going on - and yet it did nothing'
As a journalist who became a journalist out of a strong conviction that the media could do something to change the world for the better, I am constantly in despair over how little a report can achieve. People may read your story, they may send in a cheque or two at the most, but there are seldom any drastic changes. As a reporter, you document stories of people, some of which perhaps would otherwise have never been heard. More than that, to imagine one is doing anything would be wishful thinking.
Somewhere along those lines is
this piece from
The Guardian, about the world remaining silent while Darfur burns. Written by Jonathan Freedland, it starts thus:
"I once spoke to a journalist who had covered the war in Bosnia in the early 1990s. He said that he and his colleagues kept heading into harm's way, because they believed that once the world knew of the horrors they had witnessed, the world would be stirred to act. They filed their reports and waited. Soon enough, they understood. The world knew what was going on - and yet it did nothing. For some of those reporters, this experience broke their faith in the power of journalism. For others, it broke their faith in their fellow human beings."
And there you have it, crisp and clear.
'the stain at my heart caused by this gift'
A friend from a long time ago -- so long ago that it seems like another lifetime, another life indeed -- calls up in the evening. I tell her of being cooped up in the house, of visits to doctors ("You know how people go to the pub every Friday night, I visit doctors like that," and the good friend that she is, she laughs), and then of old classmates discovered on Orkut; someone has married a boy who was a year junior in college; another classmate remembers, to my eternal embarrassment, a crush-lorn poem I'd written in college and quotes from it in a yahoo group. We laugh about what we despaired over so much in those days: the boys who wouldn't acknowledge our presence, and the unpardonable number of hours spent dissecting the odd glance that came our way. "Perhaps it was the stress from those days that did me in," I tell her and we laugh again.
After I hang up, I realise the house is full of the fragrance of the rajnigandha flowers I had bought a few days ago, now fading in a glass vase. The air is pure and the night is fresh and rainy and beautiful. I forget the despair of the day, the darkness of my worries. I play Rabbi Shergill's beautiful ode to Dilli: "Yahan hai ik nadi, aur vahan hai ek lal qila, par kahan hai is shahar ka falsafa" (Over here is a river, over there is a red fort, but where is this town's philosophy?)
A call from a friend and I realise what today could have been and was not. As Ondaatje wrote in a poem that's part of
The Cinnamon Peeler: "...The raspberries my son gave me
wild, cold out of the fridge, a few I put
in my mouth, some in my shirt pocket
and forgot
I sit here
in the half dark kitchen
the stain at my heart
caused by this gift"
If you could be one person for a day, who would that be and why?
A long time ago — perhaps not that long ago, but it seems so now — a bunch of relatively well-known people interviewed me for an academic scholarship. I went for the interview well-prepared but discovered in the first five minutes that my preparation had been completely unnecessary. Except for one jury member, who asked me pertinent questions related to the subject I wanted to pursue, the rest trotted out questions that would have fit only into a beauty pageant. Fortunately, I don't remember all those questions now, but I haven't been able to forget one of those gems: 'If you could go back in time and be one person, even for a day, who would that be and why?' I was hard-pressed to compress a snigger and the answer went something on the lines of: "I am a very practical person and I don't waste my time thinking about things that cannot be. In any case, how can I be anyone else?"
Many years later, I think I have an answer. It came to me while reading Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Shadow of the Sun, in which he describes his life in Africa. Kapuscinski first went to Africa in 1957 and travelled there several times over the next 40 years. In this delightful book, the Polish journalist writes about his exciting times in a continent about which he says: "It is a veritable ocean, a separate planet, a varied, immensely rich cosmos. Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say "Africa." In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist."
He arrives in Africa when the countries in the continent are tasting independence; the air is full of the freshness and victory of freedom, of independence, of coups, of a new order (or a new chaos). He moves from one country to another, taking extraordinary risks; he is almost bitten by a snake; he gets malaria, and later TB. In a remarkable chapter set in Dar es Salaam, he begs the doctor not to send him home (when he is found to have TB). "I explained to him that this stay in Africa was the chance of a lifetime for me. That an appointment like mine was the first of its kind in my country, that Poland had never had a correspondent in sub-Saharan Africa. That it came to pass thanks to an enormous effort on the part of the editorial department, which is poor, for ours is a country where every dollar is precious. That if I inform Warsaw about my illness, they will be unable to pay for my hospitalization and will simply order me to return, and that I will most likely never come here again. And that the thing that had been a lifelong dream of mine -- to work in Africa -- will vanish forever." Of course, he stays.
Kapuscinski's writing is lyrical and descriptive. You can smell Africa in the pages of this book, feel its rhythms. But more than his obvious talent for storytelling, what makes (now that he has passed away, should I say made?) him a great journalist in my eyes is the enormous empathy with which he wrote about people, be they in Latin America or Africa.
And it was while reading The Shadow of the Sun that I had that moment, the moment when I knew the answer to the jury's terrible question. In one chapter, Kapuscinski describes driving from Dar es Salaam to Kampala. It is a three-day drive and a person he describes as "a part-time broker, part-time correspondent" goes with him. He writes: "Both sides of the road are dense with greenery. Tall grasses, thick, fleecy shrubs, spreading umbrella trees. It's this way all the way to Kilimanjaro and the two little towns nearby, Moshi and Arusha. In Arusha we turned west, toward Lake Victoria. Two hundred kilometres on, the problems started. We drove onto the enormous plain of the Serengeti, the largest concentration of wild animals on earth. Everywhere you look, huge herds of zebras, antelopes, buffalo, giraffes. And all of them are grazing, frisking, frolicking, galloping. Right by the side of the road, motionless lions; a bit farther, a group of elephants; and farther still, on the horizon, a leopard running in huge bounds. It's all improbable, incredible. As if one were witnessing the birth of the world, that precise moment when the earth and sky already exist, as do water, plants, and wild animals, but not yet Adam and Eve. It is this world barely born, the world without mankind and hence also without sin, that one can imagine one is seeing here."
What would I have not given just to be in that vehicle that day.
This way
For those who still bother to drop in here, I have set up a blog to archive the reports I am doing as part of the Sanskriti-Prabha Dutt Fellowship. It can be accessed
here.
