The Misrepresentation of India

India has been getting into the spotlight of late with the success of the movie Slumdog Millionaire, but is the representation of India fair? What brings me to this question? Two factors, well actually 2 movies…
Lets start with Slumdog Millionaire. I am sure that most of you have seen this movie by now and have either come back with a happy feeling, or feel like it was just another movie… What ironically the movie is meant to be about, is a love story and not a story of rags to riches! (Quoting the Director and main cast from their respective appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno) The point I am trying to bring out here is that yes, although India is poorer than the US and other so-called ‘Developed’ Countries, we are not known only for our poverty! We are being stereotyped into this third world place where we are the world’s garbage dump! The slums ARE a huge part of Mumbai, but Mumbai is know for many more things than just its slums!! We have some of the richest men in the world living here! (Read Ambani’s, Tata’s, Birla’s etc.) We are after all the financial capital of India! We have some of the most expensive office spaces in the world! Standing in the league of office space of greats like New York and Wall Street. Hell Rolls Royce sold out all the cars they imported to Asia last year and India forced them to get more cars this gone calendar year than last!! (For those of you who must know, last year they sold 1212 cars, over 20% higher than the previous year’s figure of 1010 cars sold in India) Yes, the super luxury marquee Rs. 5 Crore car sold One Thousand and Ten Units in India last year, that’s 5050 Crore Rupees changed hands last year…

If not money then technology! We recently completed our first mission to the moon, which carried equipment for none other than NASA! In sports, we had a very good run at the Australian Open (Tennis), Saina Nehwal is in the Top 10 rankings in Woman’s Badminton. We are (finally) winning in the Hockey tournament in Punjab. Our wonder Boy Vishvinathan Anand is the World Chess Champion and the Snooker World Champions have mostly been Indians. Surely we all are not living in Slums!

What particularly left a bad taste in my mouth, was the other movie ‘Outsourced’. Talking of the typical BPO boom which swept the city, albeit Nation a few years ago and made India the Call Centre Capital of the world! A Typical story of an Amercian who sees his job vanishing as Indians are doing what he does, for less than half his charges!
What was bitterly wrong was the way Indians were depicted. Firstly, the story was shown to have taken place in a village on the outskirts of Mumbai, which made one assume that this land is full of only villages! Then our Foreigner Man falls in love with a head strong Indian woman(village woman mind you), only to leave her and go back home when his company finds a cheaper alternative to India. China!

The way we are portrayed shows Indians to be dumb and to be ridiculed upon. Now I do have a lighter side to life and I will give in to the argument of ‘Freedom of Expression’, but to what extent? To dumb us down to such an extent that the Ambani’s and the Tata’s of India are forgotten? Only to be replaced by an old man who scratches his arse to depict WHY we consider our left hand dirty! (which I am not sure is entirely true!) If dumbing us down was done on purpose just to make an award winning movie, (yes it won some International Film Festival awards) then I think the actors, if not the director, should have thought twice before going out of their way to humiliate us Indians! If it was made to purely garner some laughs, then ok, I will keep my mouth shut. But by showing us all in a bad light? Not done honey!


So what’s the bottom line here?
Well, I just wanted to get you thinking…
Don’t believe what you see in movies?
There is more to it than what meets the eye…