CA 04: Slumdog Millionaire - Truth Hurts

I am really getting annoyed by the criticisms on Slumdog Milllionaire, particularly in India. I am actually not surprised that the likes of Shiv Sena, Preity Zinta and Shilpa Shetty criticizing, but well-informed movie makers? Come on. Give me a break. I saw the movie and liked it for the movie.

It is not new that the slums are being shown in a movie. There are hundreds of movies made each year which portray slums and its dwellers. For example, take the two Oscar nominated short documentaries this year, "Smile Pinky" and "The Final Inch". Both these show India, not in an exotic or a romantic way. You get to see the slums. Please do not deny that slums are highly sanitized green rooms.

These people who criticize were fricking sleeping all the time and wake up all of a sudden when the movie becomes a hit. Who wouldn't want to take a piece of the publicity pie. These people behave is as if the people of the world were thinking that India is a rich, developed, uncorrupted and a highly moral society. Please.

Another sideshow are the claims that the kids were exploited and that the parents were demanding more money. The justification - Now that the movie is making more money why don't you share your profits. Yeah right - Now the movie makers are the devil not sharing the profits when they had signed a profit-sharing contract with royalties and copyrights to the kids' parents. Talk about exploitation!

First of all, the movie is not about the slums, it is about a person who is a slum dweller, that too only in the intial part of the movie. The movie starts in the Mumbai slums of the 80s and 90s goes on to depict how Mumbaikars have been improving. There is clearly a scene that shows that the slums do not exist anymore, instead high rise bulidings are built in that area.

The anger that is being vented is not because India is being shown wrongfully in a bad light, but because of bringing it out to the open the actual filth that exists, that too in a subtle way.

If a kid jumps in a pile of shit, it is the creative freedom that the director enjoys and does not say that every Indian would jump in a pile of shit for a movie star.

If the movie shows kids kidnapped/bought, eys removed/hands/leg amputated, for the sole purpose of making money out of begging, it is an absolute fact. If you deny that such things do not exit, then you are doing nothing but burying your head in the sand and pretending that the world doesn't exist.

If it is shown that there are people who swindle money from tourists by acting as a fake guide and that a parked car has its parts removed, it is the truth that is being told. How many times have you parked your vehicle in a place to find the vehicle itself missing, forget about its parts. Do not tell me that no one does that in India. If you stll tell me that it is not so, you are nothing but an ignorant twit and I don't have anymore patience to explain it to you.

If you thik that you are voicing your concern on a falsehood, and think that you are expressing your patroitism, my opinion is, you are not. You are just exhibiting your callowness.

In short, truth hurts. So stop being in denial, accept the harsh facts, try to deny the opportunity for future filmmakers by making things better. And yes, finally, move on and get a life. After all it is a fictitious movie and enjoy it for what it is and don't take it personally.

CA 03: 26/11 - Just Another Date?

DISCLAIMER: I have tried to limit name calling and psycho-babbling. Still, take this blog post with a grain of salt.

At this moment in time, 26/11 is a date that has been gaining popularity among the world. Not going into what happened, I am going to ramble on the post-26/11 ramifications, from different perspectives.

Increasing Intolerance
Despite the numerous criticisms on Mr. Manmohan Singh that he has been soft on terror, the truth remains that Indians' intolerance is on the rise. Almost all reactions has been based on an emotional basis rather than on a rational basis. The day the carnage was brought to an end, the famous Shobha De came on air and started lambasting everyone around saying the NDTV's very famous theme during the coverage - "Enough is enough". Though her anger was valid and understandable, as are those who are angry about the whole situation, most of them fail to understand that it is a multi-pronged issue.

In the very same programme, there were other folks like Arun Shourie and other representatives of parties like Jayanthi Natarajan from Congress and from BJP. While Ms. De was continuing with her "Enough is enough" backed by the Channel which took it as its theme, there were visble discontent on the receiving end. Her "Enoughs" were both on the Domestic front as well as on the dealing with terrorism. Saying that decisive action needs to be taken and folks who were responsible for the failure should step down taking moral responsibility. I agree, but failure to understand the root cause will result in all these becoming short-term solutions than long-term ones. That is of course the effect of decisions taken in a state of anger. Of course, there are a bunch of folks to substantiate what Shobha did, like here. So folks, my request is be angry, but not intolerant; be rational and not emotional.

I do not want to get this issue to be discussed beyond a single post.

The Debate
Each individual was saying a few points. There were lots of reasons thrown out there, most of them were good, but what disturbed were the following. Each person was trying to downplay the other's solutions saying that it is not the real solution and went on to talk about their solutions. Even the host didn't help much. What I felt was that all points were valid and the solution should be nothing less than an all-of-the-above approach.

Soft on Terror
Even though I do not like Manmohan Singh's style of administration, I am going to give him the credit. Anybody who accused him of being soft on terror need to understand one thing. He is an economist, so much to say, he is considered the father of financial reforms in India. Without him, BJP would not have had the framework to continue with the growth that we saw. True, we were exposed to Globalization and we are affected now because of it. We do need to understand that with a beautiful seaview house comes the risk of Tsunamis. As any economist would say, any war would put a strain on the economy. Without a strong economy it is going to be difficult to support a full fledged war.

In my opinion, first, we still do not have the economic might to engage in an another war and still be resilient. The second reason is what Ms. Natarajan responded to Ms. De "Has Shobha heard about 'Actionable intelligence'?". I agree there. You cannot do anything with intelligence reports in the likes of Nostradamus predictions. CIA is one of the world's best. They were contemplating many terror scenarios including attack on the WTC and Pentagon by ramming planes. Yet it happened. The intelligence failure was the main reason why it happened and not inaction on the part of the Government.

Internal Strengthening (Playing Defense)
The Government's failure was not its inaction but the failure to address the weakness in forces. There are still flks who believe that the Indian intelligence is second to none and start their usual basking in glory of something that happenned so long ago, nobody knew how long ago. This is not going to be an easy task. The Government would have to step up to the plate and give serious consideraton to improving the capabilities. Police forces at the ground level are nothing but a corrupt lot. At least, spend mre money for those critical folks who work in the intelligence establishment. Procure more infrastructure for the defense forces. Provide importance to RAW and IB. When an ex-RAW officer writes about the corruption, instead of taking steps, they sue him??!! Rather than attack folks who provide constructive criticisms, they need to rope in people who can hel eliminate it.

In this sense, rhetorics are not going to make things done. Action on the part of the Government and the corrupt politicians. Let them get kickbacks but not on matters of National Security. Let the forces be free of politics and the usual corruption. Otherwise, we are going to see more of these happening and like 13/12 gave way to 26/11, 26/11 will give way for something else and becoming just another date.

CA 01: Bomb Blasts - So What?

DISCLAIMER: This article is purely out of frustration. I expect this blog to deviate a lot, and so is the size of the blog. If you really have time in your hands, go ahead :)

I go to work and open news.google.com to see that Bangalore (Now, don't get me started by saying it is Bengaluru) was rocked by serial blasts. My reaction was "Again?", keeping in mind the events that unfolded at IISC. The next day, same Google News, the same blasts story, but now in Ahmedabad. This time I went... "What the ..."

There have been many ways in which terrorism has been potrayed in the Indian mainstream media. Just for the sake of comparison, they say that India has lost more lives in terrorism in the last two decades than to what the US lost in its entire history. These all sounds good, evoking enough sympathy, but does it have any impact on the outside world? No. We can do some soul-searching by asking a few questions to ourselves.

Let us start from the point where the Indian media compares the figures of lives lost to terrorism with say a superior country, for this argument sake, let us say the US. People read the news world over and does it create an impact? No. Any one else, I bet not. Now, let us start the pondering. Why?

That is because no one in the outside world cares. India is not an important country to care about. Why do we have to think that way?

Marketing is important. When terrorism happens either you play the big brother and respond decisively or play a victim. India doesn't do either. How do you come to this conclusion?

Even though India is the power in South Asia, it is extremely soft on extremism. It promptly condemns acts of terrorism in all forms, irrespective of where it happens on the earth, the issue is that it is the same even if it is on its own soil!

They say that a consulate or an embassy is actually the territory of the respective country. Movies like Bourne Identity tell you that very clearly. The laws of the local country will work only if the mission chooses to. So an attack on the embassy is an attack on the country it represents itself.

So what happened when they bombed the Indian embassy in Afghanistan? They strongly condemned it. Wait a minute. Of course they did treat it like a bombing in India - by verbally telling the terrorists that we will not tolerate. What a joke!

In the game of poker, there is this term called bleeding. In the sense, the player will be losing money in small amounts every round, but does not like getting out of the game. The same is the case with India too. We want to be treated like a super power and we like to be a part of the big game, but we won't act like one and as a result bleed. We care about our dignity more than the issues at hand.

Indians have this mentality of being proud if someone in the world does something great and has an Indian connection. Prove me wrong! Take Kalpana Chawla, Sunita Williams and Bobby Jindal as examples. We take pride because we are not bred in the culture of achieving something. So we look for people who has Indian roots, proudly proclaim that an Indian did it, create a powerpoint presentation and send it to all your friends in your email contact list. Seriously, I have not seen any other country doing it. please don't tell me that it is called "being-patriotic", it is being foolish. You should achieving something on your own rather than basking in the glory of someone else. Anyway, this is a seperate discussion on its own. Let me not deviate from the topic at hand here. When we take pride by trying to tie a person's root to India, shouldn't we react in a similar manner when our country is attacked?

No we don't. We use "peace loving country" very frequently in order to cover the fact that we are incapable of doing anything about it. This is the exact reason why we are not taken seriously by anybody in the world.

We go and tell other countries not to interfere in our affairs and yet, at the same time wait for the international community to "pressurise" our neighbouring countries to stop their sponsoring of terrorism. The worst part is that we have facts and evidence. Mind you folks, these countries want active terrorsim in India. My question is, are you trying to use the methods of ZGandhi like Ahimsa, Fasting, Non-violence, etc.?

I was watching a Tamil movie the other day by the name "Ayudham Seivom" where the hero gets the baddies to repent their mistakes by going on a fast. I couldn't resist laughing, seriously. Violence doesn't help, but if you ask me, so does non-violence. My theory of why Non-violence worked against the British is that they wanted peace to prevail too. They would not have been able to run their administration without peace. Their methods of violence was just a tactics but their ultimate aim was to control the behaviour. In the end, they "chose" to hold talks. Terrorists are not running an organization which needs your cooperation. They don't want to talk. Their ultimate aim is to get rid of you. In simple terms, they want you dead. You are making life easier for them by showing your other cheek after they slapped you on the other. They do not feel any remorse whatsoever.

There has to be some logical reasoning. Did the world care about us up until we tested at Pokhran? Did the world take note of the genocide until we decided to invade East Pakistan? Seriously, we lost credibility when we failed to do anything about the Mumbai serial blasts or when the Parliament was attacked. We pardon terrorists to let them come and bomb us back. We lost all our credibility there that when the Kabul mission was attacked recently, it was just another news. Everyone knew we don't do anything about it rather than increase security in other countries. Does anyone even remember that the Indian soil was attacked by a foriegn force and still we only did promptly condemned the act of terrorism in all forms?

The only thing that I can think of is that some Indian scientists are working on a super-secret project for destroying terrorists when you just need to condemn the attacks and say that you will defeat them.

I salute those who guard our borders against infiltration as they are our only hope of reducing such acts of terrorsim. We will continue to be a peace-loving country where it is our "dream" to have peace when none exists as of now. I read on the internet that folks are scared to leave their homes in Ahmedabad. Way to go peace lovers.

These rulers of the country are a worthless bunch. Let them usher into the modern era with the strategies of stone age hunting. Even the stone age hunters had better brains I would say. Shame on you folks and may the God shower with all the luck in the universe for those who are trying to "destroy" terrorism by just "strongly condemning" the attacks.