Taking Umbrage

Taxi drivers in the city I live in deserve special mention as prospective Zen masters. They utter a sentence and lo and behold you are bound to experience a satori moment. That is if you are in the right path to enlightenment, must I add? Yesterday, I met a rather patronizing one -common in this part of the world where India shining still means glitzy Bollywood wear-, the kind who will say Vanakkam and expect you to be grateful for learning ‘your’ language (how many times I have tried explaining to them that not all Indians speak Tamil?!). The kind who advise me to move out of “the horribly expensive city area into a suburban HDB flat” so that when I go back to India, I’ll be “as rich as a princess” with the money I make here. (Make no mistake- this is not their xenophobia, just a way of saying you are fortunate to be here but make sure you go back). So this guy who apparently was a regular reader of a local newspaper, had a few well informed opinions; women still “die of dowry “in India, to be born as a woman in India is a curse, Indian food is “too spicy”, Indian men always hold hands when they walk and here comes the satori statement - Indian women do not work (this when I was on my way to work on a gloomy Monday morning)

Actually the story runs beyond the cab driver obviously. Some colorful whirling spirals later, comes this moment in which we decided to give in to the charms of Pradeep Sarkar’s camera team (what gorgeous views of the Banaras!) and set out to watch Laaga Chunari Mein Daag. The first ten minutes were very engaging despite the pathetic lyrics (humto aise hain?!)- What with the Ganges forming an almost lyrical backdrop to the setting (a family mansion which invokes more jealousy than pity), lovely ethnic wear sported by Rani and Konkana and the clichéd but inviting treats of Banaras (paan and kachodis...smack.)! What followed was a combination of Karan Johar’s wishful thinking, Sooraj Barjatya’s saccharine scenes and Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s mind-numbing pseudo-profound situations. I know I was supposed to talk about taxi driver-induced zen and not vent my love for these glorious filmmakers. The film was as clichéd as any but the anger it generated was catalyzed by a zen master into a satori moment.

Yes, I have heard this one before- that no matter what statement you make about India, you will most likely be right. And you well might be right Mr. Pradeep Sarkar that in today’s India, there are poverty ridden “family” girls who transform overnight into uber expensive escorts. But to come up with a fairy tale wherein Shivshankar’s pride is redeemed by his son-in-laws and not his daughters is repulsive. Aren’t those days are long gone? On one hand, we have a national campaign trying to create awareness of daughters being equal to sons in the most remote and rural parts of India and on the other, we have monsters right in the midst of our “urban” class who propagate ideas contrary to that. So who can blame well-informed readers of newspapers in other countries? This thought...if this thought doesn’t call for Zenness, it calls for us going berserk. Punct.