keninabu!

Monsoon Wedding hai, Mumbai hai

"Acchaa, acchaa, eck minute.... har, kyaa hua?"

What a wonderful film! I had lowered expectations, because prior to this film, the other Mira Nair film which I had watched, with the Missus, was Karma Sutra: A Tale of Love . That was a total piece of crap, in my opinion: it was too idealistic, and romanticized ancient India to the point where belief was suspended like a levitating yogi. I mean, for goodness' sake, the ancient Indians were not all about sensuality and "learning the arts of seduction"! Nor are today's Indians all spiritual, as seems to be the generalization made by most people in the West.

You cannot generalize a billion people. That is just unrealistic.

But this film, Monsoon Wedding, is so lovely because it is so real! So much like India as I remember it to be, especially in the monsoon season, with the incessant downpour which leads to much walking around through shit and crap (literally). Of course, there is a lot of romanticization and idealization in this film as well, not least because it portrays a upper-middle class Punjabi family living in Delhi (just how many Indians are rich enough to afford their own posh house, with each child having his or her OWN ROOM???), which the majority of Indians are not.

Still, there is so much of the colour, the diversity (there was one Bihari female character in the film, you have to give her that), and unlike the usual Bollywood nonsense, the whole street does not suddenly break out into a synchronized song and chorus of dancing eunuchs and working-class men: in this film, the street is the real thing, real streets with real people in the middle of Delhi. Delhi, with its Connaught Circle (practically the only thing that I ever saw of Delhi, besides the train station and airport), and gazillion people all moving to their own beat and with their own agenda.

Delhi. It is a very Indian city, to be sure, with tons of Hindustani-Devanigiri script all over the place with nary a word of English if they can help it. We met friendly people there, and the occasional good Samaritan, like the hotel manager who allowed us to use a room for a few hours even after we had already checked out, or the people at the South Indian restaurant who helped us the entire time (while serving pretty awesome South Indian food, like vadai and idli).

But overall, it is not at all like the no-nonsense-because-we-have-no-time-but-we're-friendly-enough-to-smile sense that I get from Bombay; no, in Delhi, there was a distinct tension in the air, which sparked off a sense of wariness. Not once did we ever see a child walking around unaccompanied in Delhi, and I don't remember seeing ANY woman walk around dressed the way the Bombayites did.

In Bombay, women and children went around unaccompanied all the time. In fact, after the flood, there were reports of kindness all over the place: volunteers handing out potable water to weary travellers who had walked for 16 hours through waist-deep water, rickshaw drivers ferrying or housing the children whom they were supposed to drive (but who were stuck due to the flood water), bus-drivers keeping the bus lights on to ensure that the women on the bus felt safe and secure at all times.

True, the city really stank, for weeks after the flood. But despite the governmental ineptitude, despite a flood of Biblical proportions, the city ran smoothly within three days.

And the people never stopped smiling.

posted by keninabu @ 10:52 PM