That "Shit Scene" from Slumdog Millionaire [video] has nothing to do with class and all that complicated stuff. Had Amitabh Bachchan been giving away special edition AB embellished Crossbows from Toofan, that shit route would have been an easy way out for a lot of kids, irrespective of class background.
Remember the "Toilet Scene" from Danny Boyle's Trainspotting [video]. Junky dives deep into shit to reclaim back his fix. In parallel analogy set in India, Bollywood is the Drug - the biggest fix offering the highest high. The loo offers the greatest escape. We dive deep. No Shit.-0-
That brilliant great train robbery scene having M.I.A's Paper Plane track reminded me of 'Man on the fast moving train scene' from Jhakas Anil Kapoor's - costliest Bollywood film of its time and yet dud philum - Roop ki Rani Choro Ka Raja (1993)[comparative video]. Fits the time line of the story, young Jamal couldn't have missed it.
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Slumdog Millionaire is not a jangalpani documentary on India, a country where the people of certain caste clean flushless latrines of other caste people using spades and carry the shit in leather bags hung on their back and in open metal trays on head. It is not a film about India where this practice is now officially banned. Slums, yes we do notice them, we notice them the day a green tipped white minaret crops out of them.
Slumdog Millionaire is not a 'think' film - see Salaam Bombay, a film that Jamal wouldn't see, a film that couldn't set cash registers ringing. Slumdog Millionaire is a 'feel good' film, a fable on Bollywood lines. Formula, yes it has one, but couldn't' perfect it, Bollywood has perfected them all- see Manmohan Desai films from late 70s and early 80s.
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Sometime ago, a frieind of mine saw two phirangi guys dancing and singing Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Aaja Aaja Aaja in the middle of a road. What a world, we dance on their roads and they dance on our roads.
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previous related post: A.R. Rahman on way to Oscars
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The Indo-Sri Lanka Peace Accord was signed by Rajiv Gandhi and the Sri Lankan President J.R.Jayewardene in Colombo on 29 July 1987. The very next day, on 30 July 1987, Rajiv Gandhi, while receiving an honour guard, was assaulted with a rifle butt by a Sinhalese naval cadet named Vijayamunige Rohana de Silva. Rajiv Gandhi was agile enough to save his head form any serious injury and survived this bid on his life. Rohana was court-martialled and sentenced to six years in prison but he was released after two years of serving his term. According to a news report, Rohana de Silva now sells Hindi music cassettes.
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There are no Cinema Halls left in Kashmir. Some burned up, all shut down.
Just finished reading Curfewed Night, an autobiographical-reportage Novel by Basharat Peer on Kashmir of post 1989. Even that book isn't free from Bollywood. On seeing his first bollywood film in a theater in the town of Aligarh, the Kashmiri author-protagonist gets his 'Aazadi'. And just a paragraph earlier, he writes about seeing emaciated Rickshawallas for the first time in his life. His grandfather pays the rickshawalla twice the fare for a ride and thinks, 'There is terrible poverty here.' The author-protagonist notes: ' The poverty in Kashmir wasn't as desperate.' These words reminded me of lines by early European travelers to Kashmir who documented the abject poverty of Kashmir. In 1831, a French botanist named Victor Jacquemont (Born in Paris on August 8, 1801 and died in Bombay on December 7, 1832) arrived in Kashmir valley and wrote '...nowhere else in India are the masses as poor and denuded as they are in Kashmir. It is the only country where the price of work is really as low as we believe, mistakenly, to be generally in India.'
I also remembered the slogan that cut through Arundhati Roy like a knife and clean broke her heart: Nanga bhookha Hindustan, jaan se pyaara Pakistan. (Naked, starving India, More precious than life itself - Pakistan.)
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I heard someone say India would have fought a war with Pakistan over 26/11 had Slumdog Millionaire not started making News around the globe.
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