NAMASTE Oscars!!!

“Namaste” as Ang Lee signed off his valedictorian speech littered with too many pause moments, after winning the 2012 Oscar for Best Director for Life of Pi, which reportedly pandered to the Indian diaspora across the world. But what appears to have missed by many from his speech is another ear-catcher – “Cant waste time talking of the cast”. While he did single out the young protagonist – Pi (Suraj Sharma); adult Pi (Irrfan Khan of The Amazing Spiderman fame) and Gita (Tabu of The Namesake Fame) – two prominent Indian actors from Bollywood were given a miss in his speech.

While some may chide me for making a big deal out of this, this to me is a wider endemic ingrained in the “I am superior” western psyche that appears to relish their half-baked conceptualized notions of India as a third world country, a 0.66 India who thrives below a $1 a day poverty line. While there may be some truth to that, these directors are really obsessed with the “impoverished” India, its daily struggles that assumes an even more ostentatious portrayal in their direction. The dynamic Uber India and its strong urban middle class that has catapulted the Indian stature both in economic growth and emerged as a Technology hub for world to take note of, is often left out for a very simple reason – it does not catch the figment of their imagination. What really excites the western audience in general is “India in the trenches”; a proven stereotypical Oscar winning recipe smartly mastered by the movie-chefs of recent times – Ang Lee, Danny Boyle to name a few. So the fact that Ang Lee ignored such Bollywood stalwarts in Tabu and Irrfan comes with that territorial mindset towards India in general. It appears Indian legend Anupam Kher (Silver Linings Playbook as Cliff Patel) had to fly solo at the Oscars as both Tabu and Irrfan were perhaps given an unceremonious snub.

Interestingly India’s biggest superstar of past 40 years Amitabh Bacchhan makes his Hollywood debut in the upcoming flick The Great Gatsby featuring Leonardo Dicaprio. Knowing Amitabh, it will be very difficult to imagine that he would settle for a junk role that likes of Anil Kapoor seem to grab with drooling tongues and popping eyes – remember Mission Impossible – The Ghost Protocol where Anil Kapoor played an embarrassing cameo as a business tycoon who gets beaten up by a lady. Still remember that night when I was watching that movie in the theater and folks around were going in splits watching his comical jabs that landed nowhere. Yes the same Anil Kapoor who hit a jackpot with Slumgdog Millionaire. Grapple this – In MI-V, the fancy Indian hotel with women attired in traditional lehngas dancing to some classical score in the background and high-tech car parking facility had nothing Indian about it, infact the entire sequence was shot at 5 star hotel Jumeirah Zabeel Saray in Dubai while the car silo itself was a Special Effect rendition of a parking facility in the Autostadt plant in Germany engineered by a team out of Vancouver. So the question is why would not they indulge qualified V/X teams in India to engineer the same special effect marvel, yet quickly pounce at the slightest opportunity to shoot car chase sequences through filthy ghettos of Mumbai.

Another clichéd notion of Indians is the Patel-ization of their characters in movies. Not all Indians are Patels while most Patels are of Indian origin. Hollywood somehow has this bizarre fixation for tagging them as Patels in their movies – Pi Patel, Cliff Patel. Nothing against Patels, some of my closest friends have been Shahs and Patels but it restricts India’s diversity to spread on the world’s biggest stages.

While directors like Lee and Boyle bask in their creative geniuses to portray India on global celluloid, it remains to be seen if this obsession of painting India in poor light will one day be passé.

This write up is only a microcosmic superficial insight into the western perception towards India but would like to share a brilliant analysis by Srividya Subramanium's that provides an in-depth study of India's portrayal in western movies A Content Analysis of the Portrayal of India in Films Produced in the West.