Hilarious Hindi Movie Titles

I have been so consumed with my job recently, that i have had little time to watch the trashy hindi movies that I normally love to watch! To catch up, I looked at a list of movies released this year and found some absolutely hilarious titles:

• MR. KHUJLI
• MR. HOT MR. KOOL
• BHOOT UNCLE
• MANORANJAN--THE ENTERTAINMENT
• PANGA NA LO
• ROCKY--THE REBEL
• DIL SE POOCH KIDHAR JAANA HAI
• GOOD BOY BAD BOY
• UNNS...MEANS LOVE
• HOT MONEY
• HUSN---LOVE AND BETRAYAL
• MOBILE PHONE
• LOVE KE CHAKKAR MEIN

Need I comment on how devoid of content these movies may be? Are we really that desperate for escape that we would watch any of these? :)

An opinion on the darker side of the Abhi-Ash wedding....

Indians and even some non-Indians worldover are gripped with excitement over the wedding of Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan. She is a former Miss World, top Bollywood actress and one of the faces of international cosmetics firm L'Oreal. She has featured on the cover of Time magazine, and is one of the few Indian actors to have successfully crossed over into western cinema. She has been on Oprah Winfrey show, and the David Letterman show. Her wax statue has even been placed in Madame Tussaud's in London.

She comes from an educated middle-class family, excelled at academics, but chose modeling and then films because it is hard not to when you are regarded as the most beautiful woman in the world. Despite all her fame, fortune and success, she has remained deeply traditional, maintained her closeness to her family, and guarded her privacy. With all these accomplishments, she has won the respect and admiration of millions of women and girls in India today. She stands for what is possible for today’s Indian woman: beauty, education, independence, financial freedom, strength and respect on the world stage.

Unsurprisingly, sometime last year, Aishwarya Rai decided that it was time to get married. She set her sights on the best that Bollywood or rather, India had to offer. Her hard-earned social, political and economic capital landed her a match with Abhishek Bachchan, son of Bollywood’s first family. What followed that decision however, has been rather shocking. She and her in-laws---perhaps the most famous and well-regarded family in all of India---appear to have regressed heavily into a world of strong patriarchal traditions and deep-rooted superstition.

When Aishwarya was found to be “manglik” (born under mars, which is considered a sign of bad luck in India) she joined the Bachchans in a series of superstitious acts that were intended to protect them from her bad influence. She is said to have visited the Sankat Mochan temple in Varanasi in the dead of the night and had married to a tree (under the hope that any bad luck would befall the tree instead of Abhishek Bachchan). In a further display of superstition and blind-faith, her father-in-law Amitabh Bachchan and his confidants, industrialist Anil Ambani and Amar Singh, visited the Tirupati temple and offered Rs.5 million each to the temple trust, one of the richest in the country. Amitabh has also donated 100 kg of gold and placed a card for his son’s wedding at the deity’s feet. The pictures from these events show that his fingers were adorned with stones of many different types, all presumably to ward off the evil eye that may be brought by a manglik daughter-in-law.

Who Aishwarya Rai marries, and how she goes about it is her private business. Yet, I find her transformation from an independent-minded international superstar to a demure and quiet daughter-in-law who touches her husband’s feet (I believe she did that at her wedding) rather disappointing. It seems to suggest that all said and done, an Indian woman’s worth is still ultimately determined by the man she marries and the family she marries into. Worse, I think the very public displays of superstition, and the flagrant use of wealth and power to deal with superstition have undoubtedly setback the millions of so-called “manglik” girls of India. Besides legitimizing a rather dubious concept that is damaging to a woman, Aishwarya Rai and the Bachchans together seem to have legitimized the idea that bad horoscopes for a woman should matter, and worse, that they are best dealt with by paying and praying in the right temples of India.

Amitabh Bachchan’s role in all this has been as surprising as Aishwarya’s. He is aware of how well respected he is in India. He has been hugely successful in making a dent in the campaign against polio simply because he has such a huge following and people believe in him. To put his superstitions and put strong patriarchal values on public display seems to be a rather surprising.

I should wrap this up here! I don’t want to be guilty of participating in the frenzy surrounding this wedding for too much longer. I hope that Aishwarya Rai doesn’t lose her identity in her new marriage, or allow her career to be dominated by her in-laws. That would be most unfortunate for a woman who was capable of attaining so much on her own, and setting new examples of what is possible for Indian women today.

A confusing night

Last night was a Wednesday night in Washington DC. It was also the first warm night of the year. I was headed to the Science Club—a lovely club off of M street---to sing at an Indian open microphone event. My office mate, an accomplished tabla player, had put me in touch with a group of people who were bringing together artists and aspiring artists of Indian origin in the DC area and this was our first event. I was so excited. For a person who sings Indian music, and that too classical and semi-classical music from North India, it is rare to have the opportunity to share it.

The experience turned out to be something far beyond what I could have imagined. Barring a couple of acts, the open-microphone was basically a forum for presenting poetry, comedy and music that vented many different types of confusions: Who am I? What do I do if “I am too white to be black and too black to be white”? Arranged marriages “suck”. People who my sister is meeting through the arranged marriage circuit are “losers”, “liars” and “child molesters”. India is what you see in Bollywood. Bollywood is basically porn. That explains why you see so many people when you go to India. What does my white boyfriend think of me? What do I think of my white boyfriend? “My people” and “his people”. How do we get along?

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I sang a meera bhajan. My music stuck out like a sore thumb because it was Indian. Meera bai was a queen from Rajasthan who lived around 1500 AD and was widely known all over India for her devotion to Lord Krishna. Her longing to unite with Lord Krishna ultimately led her to renounce the world and wander around Rajasthan, preaching of his powers, and gaining followers. The bhajan I sang was composed in a classical raga (Shankara). I think it went over okay: people whistled and clapped and applauded. But…. I know that I could have just as well sung in Swahili. Nobody there had any understanding of the music, or the history, geography or culture that generated it. It was “kinda cool” and I was told that I had a “nice voice”. The words, the history, the Indian bhakti tradition, the ambience of the desert of Rajasthan was utterly and totally lost.

The experience left me rather shaken. To see aspiring Indian artists talking about dual identities in America, and yet not be able to comprehend a basic song from India, left me taken aback. The American side of most of the performers seemed quite complete and quite secure. Their thoughts and experiences of America were truly their own and their opinions about America were grounded in experiences of friends, schools, jobs, careers, and just about every other aspect of life. Their Indian side however, was severely stunted. Opinions on India and Indian culture were basically based on only their interactions to their family and family-friends. Very few people who came to the microphone last night seemed to have any independent experiences in India or of India. Many people at the microphone talked about growing up in suburbs of American cities. For them, India is what their family tells them it is. Any identity issues are not really confusions about what it means to be “Indian Americans”, but rather, what it means to be “American members of that particular family”.

To me, it seems that when a person says that they have a dual cultural identity, they need to have experiences in two cultures. Hanging out with a handful of Indian families in the US and hanging out with family in India once in a few years is not enough of an inroad into another culture. Learning the language, reading literature, studying a country’s history, understanding its cultural evolution, and most important of all, spending time with people who live there who are your own age, and understanding their lives and experiences gives you the authority to talk about India. I was very impressed with one particular person who came to the microphone to talk about violence against women in India. He had spent a year in India working for an NGO in Gujrat. He didn’t need to address issues of identity. In working with the poor and the disadvantaged, he had found more to think about and more to say.

As I drove home from my rather traumatic experience, I arrived at an interesting realization. In my view, those American-born-Indians who truly push themselves to experience modern-day India either by traveling there without family, or volunteering there, or making their own friends there, or by just spending time there, typically do not have confused identities or frustrations. People who don’t do this tend to confuse their family’s culture for a nation’s culture. They have confused identities not because of a clash of cultures, but because of the normal clash of generations that can be found in every family. I would advise every Indian born in America who feels confused to travel to get to know India on their own terms., and find their own India. Else it makes sense to embrace the reality of being American. This country gives all its citizens millions of ways to define themselves that have little to do with India. That road will lead to a better place than the road of trying to find India without knowing India.