Indian Writing

Rediff’s Archana Masih reports from Bihar about the schoolgirls of the state. Do read the whole thing, and see those lovely, hopeful pictures. Here are some extracts:

Mintu Kumari, age 11, Class VI (in picture above, from Rediff):

I always wanted to go to school but my mother told me I had to go sweep leaves and gather them for building a fire for cooking at home. So everyday I had to go and collect dry leaves instead of going to school.

My brother — I don’t know his age — but he didn’t go to school either and works in a bangle factory. My father works as a labourer in Punjab. He has lost sight in one eye (starts crying). He came to see us last year, I don’t know when he will come again.

*****

Prabha Kumari, age 13, Class VII:

I am from the musahar caste*, where our people usually do not study. Musahars don’t eat rats so much now as they did before.

Since I was a child I wanted to study. My parents did not allow me or want me to study. So I went to this didi at the Mahila Samkhya**. I didn’t know how to hold a pen and she taught me how to start writing.

I did not have a pen or a note book, so I stole Rs 5 from my home and bought a pen for Rs 2 and copy for Rs 2.

*****

Ramita Kumari, age 18, Class XII:

Apart from my studies, I visit 10 villages every month. I have to make two trips to every village. I walk to the villages with my brother. Sometimes we walk through most of the day. I have been doing this since September 2006.

I go to the villages, gather the women and tell them to send their children to school. I tell them if their daughters do not study they will not be able to know their own selves. They will die as they were born — unknown, unheard.

I tell them that even I would have had a life of no worth had I not studied. I tell the mothers to learn to write their name, at least. The mothers sometimes ask me what will they get by educating their daughters, so I give them my example. Some listen, some don’t.

No one in my family has ever got to class XII, I am the youngest of three brothers and three sisters, I am the only one who has got so far. I want to do a BA and become a police officer.

*****

Baby Kumari, age 12, Class VI:

My father is a labourer, I live in a small thatched hut but I’ve represented Bihar in many swimming competitions and won several medals.

Seeing my interest in swimming, my father saved Rs 350 so that I could get a swimsuit. The person who trains us, bought the swimsuit from Patna.

On seeing the swimsuits of me and my two friends — Savitri and Payal, who are also champion swimmers too — people in the village said: ‘What is this?’ But now we’ve participated in many competitions, so it doesn’t matter.

We went to Goa for a swimming meet early this year but they put us in the 19-year category. Still I stood 6th.

We began swimming in the village pond when we were very young and people began telling us we were good. We trained in our village against the wishes of many villagers and try to be our best with whatever resources we have.

We wake up at 3 am every day and go to the pond to swim. We run and swim to build our stamina and swim for two-and-a-half hours every day. Then we come home, eat vegetable and roti and walk to school. It takes us an hour to reach school.

I don’t eat anything during lunch because I am not eligible for the mid day meal scheme (the free lunch given to children up to Class V), so I stay hungry till I get back for dinner.

Anguri Khatun, age 18, Class VIII:

My father was murdered. The tragedy turned my mother almost mad with grief and it was left to my grandmother to look after my four brothers and sisters. She worked as a labourer so that we could get some money to eat.

I started attending school regularly after I turned 14. I used to finish the house work and go to the government school. My family and elders did not allow me to come to school. My family used to say — ‘What’s the use of studying? Are you going to become a collector you think?’

They would say that girls would get spoiled if they were sent to school and their place was in the house. But I managed to get myself to school with the help of the didi from the welfare programme and I now stay in a hostel.

I want to become a graduate. I also teach screen painting and karate. I earn Rs 2,000 every month for teaching screen painting and Rs 1,000 for karate.

Bihar’s literacy rate (2001 census) is 47.5%, males 60.3 %, females 33.57%. Among the districts, Kishanganj’s female literacy rate is 18.49%; there are fifteen districts with a female literacy rate less than 30%.

Those are depressing figures.

But the stories of these young girls, and their aspirations, bring tears to my eyes. I admire their endurance and spirit, and they make me hopeful about the future.

————————————————

*a community of rat-eaters, considered one of the lowest castes in the ‘caste hierarchy’
**an all woman project run by the government aimed at assisting the most disadvantaged women in areas with lowest literacy rates

Update: Also see A Day in the Life of a School in Bihar.

Via Moorishgirl, I came across this LA Times article about the budget of the 2005 action film Sahara. The film, which was mostly filmed in Morocco, lost a huge amount of money. But it had cost a lot to make, and look at some of the ways in which the money was spent. “Courtesy payments,” “gratuities” and “local bribes” are bad enough; then there’s a $40,688 payment to stop a river improvement project. A $23,250 for political support.

One payment was made to expedite the removal of palm trees from an old French fort called Ouled Zahra, said a person close to the production who requested anonymity.

Other items include $23,250 for “Political/Mayoral support” in Erfoud and $40,688 “to halt river improvement project” in Azemmour. The latter payment was made to delay construction of a government sewage system that would have interrupted filming.

*****

And as for product placements, they seem to affect the plot in ways that would be funny if they weren’t so chillingly real:

Producer Karen Baldwin demanded script changes to accommodate DaimlerChrysler because the German-American carmaker negotiated to have its Jeep trucks featured in the film. “You can’t have the truck get almost stuck,” Baldwin wrote in a March 2004 e-mail to “Sahara” executives. “I would bet that Jeep will have a heart attack when they see that. They want to show how well the Jeep handles and responds — not that it will get stuck in a tough situation.”

Four months earlier, when director Breck Eisner expressed concern during development of the film about problems with another sequence involving a four-wheel-drive truck, Baldwin wrote in a memo, “Can’t cut it. Jeep to pay 3 million.”

*****

For a big-budget film, the “Sahara” production team was reluctant to spend on animal safety requirements:

Although the actual jumps were performed by a trained camel master, there was no independent safety officer on hand during the filming of “Sahara” to monitor the treatment of more than 100 camels, horses, donkeys and other animals. That’s because producers of the $160-million movie opted not to pay a $30 hourly rate plus travel and other expenses, said Karen Rosa, director of the American Humane Assn.’s film and television unit. As a result, the film’s credits could not include a statement certifying that “no animals were harmed” in the making of the movie. “Sahara” executives said they were not required to use the American Humane Assn. because the production was based in Britain. “No animals were injured during the shooting of the film, and professional animal trainers were used,” one executive said about “Sahara.” He declined to be identified.

The animal-welfare organization assigns safety officers at no cost to about 900 U.S. films annually. “We’ve learned after doing this for 67 years,” Rosa said, “that you need to be there to know the level of care the animals receive.”

The rest of those numbers contain more revelations, but this was all I could take.

This film is not quite sure whether it wants to be the new updated DDLJ, or a rugby version of Lagaan, or the Akku version of Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam. But it does know that it wants to be allusive and clever. Thus, there are allusions to Kkk-serials, Purab aur Paschim, Lagaan, and even to the unreal ways of moviemaking itself. It also wants to be a diaspora-meets-heartland film - its tagline is “A funjabi boy meets a hinglish brat” (even if Akshay Kumar stopped being a boy a couple of decades ago). So it has a Taj Mahal moment, a bride’s drunken father moment, a runaway bride moment, and, lest we forget, a red lungi moment accompanied by a crude joke. It has a huge and giggly joint family back in Punjab, complete with desi ghee, tractor-dance and all. It has a cellphone with a Saare Jahan Se Acchha ringtone. It has a putting-the-’goras’-in-their-place speech, delivered in Hindi with English translation and jingoistically swelling music in the background. All this, under what is broadly a Taming-of-the-shrew template.

Oh, and it has several Himesh songs. Okay, I’m actually… quite fond of Himesh songs. I like the mixture of wails, yowls and low-intensity growls interspersed with words like Chakna Chakna. I won’t go out and buy the CD, but I can listen to the songs again, if they’re on FM. Without wincing.

And product placements - Bharat Matrimony, Western Union, Spykar Jeans - have rarely been done more clumsily. At one point one of the characters is actually telling the other that Spykar is the first Indian brand to have a store in London.

Sigh. Okay, Rishi Kapoor is cute. Blustering, noisy, often over the top, but okay - he’s cute. I know it could have been worse - it could have been Anupam Kher or Alok Nath as the father. Akshay Kumar is his usual freaky comic self - yes, I like the pink kurta, I like the epaulettes, I like the weird thing he does with the car battery wires without even having to look at them but managing to get the car to start again. And even Katrina Kaif has her cheery moments.

But such moments are few and far between. The plot is freaky - sorry to ask a humourless real-life question about a Bollywood film, but do these people not have jobs? I mean, other than the female lead, who’s engaged to her boss anyway, so how does the job matter. I know Rishi Kapoor’s character is supposed to be a lawyer (and I liked his bookshelf - books on art, home decor, fine wines, and also the last Harry Potter book). But the Akshay Kumar character - what, pray, is his revenue model? (That one is even asking these questions - instead of laughing, humming along with tunes, mentally filing away bits of dialogue - is surely a sign of how the movie fails as good Bollywood masala.)

On the whole, the movie illustrates another feature of Bollywood - the general inability to tell a story about different cultures without indulging in ethnic slurs, racist jokes, and the worst kind of stereotyping. The British boyfriend is called Charlie Brown - no, really - and he’s nothing like that little boy from Peanuts. On the other hand, this Charlie Brown is three-times divorced, quite the playboy, always trying to (gasp) smooch his fiancee. (He owns a yacht, though, and I think allowances should have been made for that.)

On the other hand, the good Indian husband himself closes the room door when he sees his wife dressed in a towel. The British man is shown as a racist, while the Indian is of course a liberal with a heart of gold. The British man makes an insulting racist remark to a woman at a nightclub, and then the Indian man dances with her to show how liberal he is. Not possible to feel good without making the other guy look bad, no?

(Outside in the lobby was a poster of the Halle Berry-Bruce Willis film Perfect Stranger. I overheard a couple arguing about Halle Berry’s looks - the man saying how HOT the actor is, the woman saying how ugh, how dark… And did someone say Indians are not racist?)

Bah. Vipul Shah should really spend some time watching his talented wife Shefali Shah’s best films, Satya and Monsoon Wedding, to understand what storytelling is about.

A~ has nothing to add because he didn’t see the film, he slept through it. It was the late-night show at Metro. He has this instinct, he can just doze off after twenty minutes of a bad film, while I just sit there and sit there hoping that it will get better, all the way up to the end, and it never ever does. A~ woke up midway, like the dormouse at the Mad Hatter’s tea party, just to see the Tara Rum Pum trailer, and then - scared off by Rani Mukherjee’s hair colour, or was it the saccharin? - he went back to sleep.