Cloud 9 Minus One

After seeing Julie and Julia, my husband and I got into a real, shirt-sleeves-rolled-up-jackets-off-take-no-prisoners fight over why Bollywood is incapable of making such movies. Ratna Pathak Shah’s words at the Bombay launch were reverberating in my ears. She had loudly declared to an appalled audience that she felt ashamed that Bollywood was now the face of India, considering that it produced such ‘s—t’, and she didn’t put these dashes, she said the word out loud.

I agree with her fully. Why can’t we do some homework before rushing to the hall of fame? Why can’t we make well-directed, well-scripted, well-acted software? Why do we have such few Pankaj Kapurs, Naseeruddin Shahs, Seema Biswas’s? Why do we always, but always, depend on good old histrionics and action stunts to see our movies and TV programs through? And why, oh why, don’t we demand anything better?

Nora Ephron, the director of Julie and Julia, is certainly not one of Hollywood’s best directors, and Hollywood is certainly not the best where world cinema is concerned, yet the movie was a treat to watch. We saw actual shots of food being cooked, we saw actual shots of Julia Child, we had a genius called Meryl Streep who literally became the celebrity cook, we had 1950s atmosphere recreated, we got a feel of what the infamous McCarthyism was like back then, and all because someone had spent at least a year writing the script, going over the details meticulously, doing their research, showing publishers, cordon bleu cooks, railway porters as they actually are!

Hindi television, if that is at all possible, is even worse than Hindi cinema. The best-selling soap, Baalika Badhoo, shows a village granny in Rajasthan sitting at a dining table eating out of china! Just a slight inquiry would reveal that Rajasthani women of that generation eschew china as being unclean and casteless.

I can continue this rant forever, but I won’t for fear of boring my readers. The bright light on the horizon is the proliferation of Indian writing that veers to the realistic, rather than the idealised, and the easy accessibility to world-class entertainment, which will surely open our eyes to the possibilities that exist out there if only we can get off our lazy asses and grab them!