Two films, A Sandra Bullock-George Clooney starrer and a Robert Redford acted (Redford is put off by the word "star" in connection with actors), Gravity and All is Lost, respectively, are about men and women who are adrift, one in space and the other at sea.
The films seems to reflect, as Maureen Dowd says in her profile on Robert Redford, the national mood, which is that of a nation unmoored.
I am a fan of Hollywood, and an ardent critic of its Indian counterpart, Bollywood. Hollywood has its high and low moments and defects; but from time to time one can hark back on films coming out of this entertainment goliath and claim that in some ways some films manage to mirror the American soul (if there is such a national soul).
I rarely see a Bollywood movie that deals with the Indian soul in the sense that it catches the national mood in a particular state of anger, melancholia, elation or depression. What Bollywood does is take on an event by the neck, convert it into a crude story, and fling it at the audience with song and dance sequences.
How else does one account for the birth of a movie like Raanjhanaa, which glorifies male obsession for a female object of love? In these times when stalking, brutalizing and raping of women in India are disturbing the national conscience, a movie celebrates a cause of that disturbance.
And, the surprising part is that Raanjhanaa is a big hit in India.
Anyhow, India has been adrift for a long time. Care to make a movie reflecting this, Bollywood?
This according to the New York Times' blog India Ink:
There is some evidence that Indians are more actively seeking pornography on the Internet than citizens of many other countries:
New Delhi, population 16 million, was the city with the highest-worldwide percentage of searches for “porn” in 2012. Dallas was the second highest.Google searches for the word “porn,” as a proportion of total Google searches, have increased five times between 2004 and 2013 in India, according to Google Trends. Over that period, India ranked fourth worldwide, after Papua New Guinea, Trinidad and Tobago, and Pakistan.
One of every five mobile users in India wants adult content on his 3G-enabled phone, one 2011 study by IMRB concludes, and pornography Web sites rank among the most popular in India. Sunny Leone, an Indian-origin Canadian porn star, became a popular in India after appearing on the “Bigg Boss” house here in 2011.
While the "good" news (for those Indians who measure their superiority/inferiority as a culture vis a vis their neighbors) is that Pakistan still ranks higher than India in the porn-search statistics, the bad news is that this search isn't passive. The deep and rising interest in pornography could be behind what many have dubbed the "rape epidemic" in India.
I'm not surprised by the spike in pornography downloading in India. Indian males have been fond of pornography for a long time, it's only now that technology can track and evince these proclivities and formalize them as cultural practices.
But what confounds me is how a proposed "banning" of pornography in India would solve the problem of rape. Rape isn't just a sexual or an impious act, it's an act of extreme violence that could happen when women are typecast as an overly submissive species, not just in pornography but in mass culture.
Pornography is ubiquitous in popular Indian culture. Bollywood, the most hegemonic of all Indian popular cultural forms, is pornographic at its core, as it objectifies women like no other movie industry in the world does. Bollywood-Porn, like other kinds of pornography, divests the female of her individuality, by making her an object mostly that males can variously ogle at, lust after, wolf-whistle into oblivion, imagine as passive receptacles of their seeds, etc.
The woman in a typical Bollywood fare is an object that exists only to titillate the male organ.
Sociologist Ashis Nandy had observed years ago that we Indians should not underestimate the power of popular culture, by which he meant Bollywood, to shape our notions of socialization and sexualization. Indians have continued to ignore the effect Bollywood has on the Indian mind and now that sexual crime against women and girls have become a grave social problem, they turn to single out pornography as the sole villain.
Listen to the song, and if you don't understand Hindi, just study the body language of both the girl and the boy; the scene is deceptively framed within the traditional Indian festival of holi, when Indian males get a chance to freely touch the bodies of females with whom they allegedly "play" holi. But its a pornographic scene; observe the manner in which the relationship between the boy and girl is shown to transform in a few seconds, from being asexual and/or friendly to one of lust and extreme desire. The boy lunges forward and begins to chase the female with such ferocity that it doesn't look like the celebration of spring anymore.
A generation of Indian males are raised to watch this as popular entertainment and you get the picture of what it does to their mind regarding women.
And don't be fooled: "Balam pichkari" has been corrupted from Krishna's time into symbolizing the self-spraying male organ. The male organ has been represented by several objects over time in Bollywood--as a syringe, as a "danda" or a stick, and here as a "pichkari" that wants to wet the object.
As kids we used to watch older Hindi movies from a pre-Bollywood era on television and have a blast, every time the Gargantuan body of comedienne Tun Tun floated onto the screen, to regale audiences with her brand of corny, physical humor.
Tun Tun's jokes fell flat on our ears, but it was her presence we guffawed at, we had a suspicion that she wasn't a "She," but a "He" dressed up as a she. In fact we were convinced that "Tun Tun" was none other than "Mahmood," the fat Charlie Chaplinesque jokester who was a comic staple in Hindi films.
It was quite common for men to do female roles in older Hindi movies, especially from the black and white times, because film acting was looked down upon as a thing that women of "ill-repute" did.
Shalom Bollywood, a new, eye-opening documentary on early Hindi cinema and the role of women therein, tells a riveting story of how it wasn't just men, but young Jewish Indian female dancers, women hailing from Jewish families settled in India, especially in and around the region of Mumbai, who played female roles in Indian movies from the early twentieth century.
I did not know that the famous actress Nadira was a Florence Ezekiel.
Yet another evidence of a strong Jewish DNA in Indian culture.
Going by the mindless and brainless douchebags that dominate today's Bollywood, the Jewish DNA might sound like a joke or a phantom of the past.
The new Eros International movie English Vinglish takes a look at ESL-lives or the lives of those who are classified as English as Second Language speakers in the United States.
Story:
The story of a quiet, sweet tempered housewife who endures small slights from her well educated husband and daughter everyday because of her inability to speak and understand English. She is resourceful and open-minded but somehow these traits don't get noticed by them. Then one day on a trip to visit her sister in Manhattan she decides to enroll in an English Learners class and meets a host of new people who teach her to value herself beyond the narrow perspective of her family.
Annu Palakunnathu Matthews, a Professor of photography at Rhode Island University, has a creative way of critiquing sexism in Indian popular culture, a.k.a. Bollywood.
In a project called Bollywood satirized, Matthews uses digital technology to make changes on Indian movie posters and make a commentary, in turn, on Indian gender norms and stereotypes.
Ms. Matthews recalls being the victim of sexist attitudes as a young girl growing up in India and says she felt very angry at the tiresomely repetitive posters that inevitably showed women in various postures and moods of subordination to the men. They were shown to either cry, or laugh (because they were in love) or sing, or rescued from a dangerous situation by a sturdy male figure.
The poster above is not an alteration of an existing movie, but a representation of a real incident--that of the recent gang rape in India's capital of New Delhi, in which a young woman and her male companion was brutalized in a moving bus. The woman went on to die.
There were myriads of responses to the incident and the most terrifying one's were from the officialdom and the politicians of India. Abhijit Mukherjee, Member of the Indian Parliament and son of Pranab Mukherjee, some Minister or the other in his career of acute sycophancy in the Indian Congress hierarchy, said that women ought not to wear anything but "long overcoats" when they venture out in the streets after dark. By "long overcoats" Mr. Mukherjee clearly didn't mean a fashionable Burberry, but some sort of a loose overall like a bloated top of a salwar kameez, is my guess.
The poster above is a meaningful recreation of the anachronistic-ness of Indian male politicians where women and modernity is concerned.
Here's a gem of a film clip I got from the New Yorker magazine: a moment from a 1967 Hindi movie, named Aman, where a young Indian doctor, played by the very unsightly and singularly untalented Rajendra Kumar (we used to call him "gajendra" Kumar because of his ungainly elephantine gait) meets Betrand Russell in his house in London.
The Indian doctor is an idealist who earns his medical degree in London and wants to work in Japan to help victims of the Hiroshima Nagasaki nuclear holocaust.
Russell, reverentially referred to as the "lord" and the "mahapurush" in the movie, is 97 at this point in his life, and recognized globally for being a champion of nuclear disarmament, speaks in a shaky voice but it's all drowned by a obnoxious Hindi translation (subtitles weren't the norm back then in Bollywood).
I remember this actress as simply "Helen" the "cabaret" dancer in pre-Bollywood days of Hindi cinema.
No sooner would Helen appear on the screen--never to act, but always to wriggle her breasts and hip--the movie theater would break out into a cacophony of wolf whistles, emanating from the gruffly mustached lips of male members in the audience.
But Helen is also Helen Richardson, the daughter of a Burmese mother and an Anglo-Indian father, with a rich life-trajectory.
Helen's parents were forced to emigrate from Burma after Japan occupied the country.
In today's day and age, Helen would be a cherished object of diligent study on account of the text-book hybridity of her identity.
Watch her life in this documentary Queen of the Nautch Girls.
