ON INDIA WITHIN AND WITHOUT

GLOBAL CATALYSTS

The UK's Guardian addresses the debate that's been developing around the movie "Slumdog Millionaire", and discussed in my post a few days ago:

"After its rapturous reception in Britain and America, knives are being sharpened for Slumdog Millionaire. "Vile," is how Alice Miles described the movie in The Times. "Slumdog Millionaire is poverty porn" that invites the viewer to enjoy the miseries it depicts, she adds.

Even that old iconic Bollywood blusterer, Amitabh Bachchan, has thrown his empty-headed two rupees' worth into the mix. "If Slumdog Millionaire projects India as a third-world, dirty, underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations," he bellowed. "It's just that the Slumdog Millionaire idea, authored by an Indian and conceived and cinematically put together by a westerner, gets creative global recognition," he added.

Bachchan is no doubt riled, as many other Bollywood no-talents will be, about the fact that the best film to be made about India in recent times has been made by a white man, Danny Boyle. Just as Spike Lee got hissy with Quentin Tarantino after he proved he could make hipper films about black people than Lee could (Lee ostentatiously criticised Tarantino's use of the word "nigger" while littering his own films with the same language), so many Indians will be upset about a westerner having a better understanding of their country than they do."

The piece goes on to give a rationale for why this state of affairs may have come to pass:

"The bitter truth is, Slumdog Millionaire could only have been made by westerners. The talent exists in India for such movies: much of it, like the brilliant actor Irrfan Khan, contributed to this film. But Bollywood producers, fixated with making flimsy films about the lives of the middle class, will never throw their weight behind such projects. Like Bachchan, they are too blind to what India really is to deal with it. Poor Indians, like those in Slumdog, do not constitute India's "murky underbelly" as Bachchan moronically describes them. They, in fact, are the nation. Over 80% of Indians live on less than $2.50 (£1.70) a day; 40% on less than $1.25. A third of the world's poorest people are Indian, as are 40% of all malnourished children. In Mumbai alone, 2.6 million children live on the street or in slums, and 400,000 work in prostitution. But these people are absent from mainstream Bollywood cinema.

Bachchan's blinkered comments prove how hopelessly blind he and most of Bollywood are to the reality of India and how wholly incapable they are of making films that can address it. Instead, they produce worthless trash like Jaane Tu, Rock On!! and Love Story 2050, full of affluent young Indians desperately, and mostly idiotically, trying to look cool and modern.

Slumdog Millionaire is based on the novel, Q&A, by Vikas Swarup. I know Vikas – an Indian diplomat, he loves his country as much as anyone and did it the service of telling its truth with great warmth and humanity. And Danny Boyle's film continues in precisely the same vein. His innovative brilliance, fresh perspective and foreign money was vital. As an outsider, he saw the truth that middle-class Indians are too often inured to: that countless people exist in conditions close to hell yet maintain a breath-taking exuberance, dignity and decency."

It's an important point to keep in mind about India in matters far beyond movies made about India by Indians or foreigners.
India is still a developing country, with only a 2 to 300 million of it's 1.1 billion souls living a middle-class or better life.  Most people in India do not yet have access to clean water.
A couple of days ago my friend Rajesh Jain had a post on his blog wondering when India would be able to get it's own Obama and a government that would pro-actively address the many issues and opportunities ahead for the country.  A comment by one of his readers, Antariksh Patel, hit home:

"Indians who watched the swearing in of Obama or who use technology consist only a fraction of the population. ultimately, its the rural India that's going to decide who’s gonna rule for next 5 yrs, just like last time. and while voting, rural India considers Bijli, Paani, Sadak and also cast and creed. educating them is the only solution to allow them to think beyond petty politics."

Antariskh is referring to electricity, water and roads with his comment on "bijli, paani and sadak", and it'd be a great start to addres those infrastructure issues head-on for India to go the next level.  China has long started to do this and is accelerating efforts with it's recent commitment to infrastructure spending to address the global downturn.
India's politicians, be they Obamaesque or not, have an opportunity to really step up to the plate as well. 
But in the meantime, Indians will do what they did with the India outsourcing miracle (Satyam notwithstanding).  They created global opportunities for themselves not because of their government, but despite them. 
Coming back to Indian movies, "Slumdog Millionaire" is just an example of a movie about India getting global recognition not just because of the Bollywood establishment, but despite them.