So much of a role model!

 King Richard (2021)

Director: Reinaldo Marcus Green

By now, everybody would have heard about the movie 'King Richard', not because the leading actor, Will Smith, won the Oscar but the slapping of the host, Chris Rock. Many are arguing whether the showdown was staged. Will Smith, walking up to the stage to smack Rock for cracking an off-colour joke about her alopecia, was really uncalled for. Behavioural specialists and body language experts have been working overtime to analyse, frame by frame, the demeanour of Smith, his wife Jeda and Rock to surmise that it was not staged. 

This movie is a biopic about the untiring efforts of Richard Williams to make world-class tennis stars out of Venus and Serena. Richard, a pushy father, steamrolled himself to get trainers for his daughter. A slave driver, he did not want his daughters another statistic in the sea of black children with social issues. He abhorred violence and was bullied by the local hoodlum.

It is ironic that Will Smith, who won his role as Richard, behaves in such a non-acceptable way. His action does not augur well with his status as an advocate of 'Black Lives Matter'. It just reinforces the stereotyping that blacks are violent people. Verbal abuse can be reflected with wit.

It is said that, in the early 1900s, Swami Vivekanda was in a canteen in the UK. He went to sit at a bench where his Professor, a white man, was seated. Seeing the Indian man about to share his bench, he rebuked, "You know a pig and a bird cannot sit together!". Almost instantaneously, Swami Vivekananda replied, "it is quite alright, I can fly away!" and went away before the Professor knew what hit him.

How people look at us is in how we make them look at us. This Singaporean driver used a jack to tilt the car so that it could fill more petrol, to stretch his Singapore dollar at a filling station across the border in Johore Bahru. This action just reinforces the public (non-Singaporeans) the perception that they (Singaporeans) are more like country bumpkins - thrifty, penny-wise and just uncouth. One cannot blame Johoreans if they form a poor opinion about their southern neighbours if this is what they see week over week.

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The naked truth about gender equality!

Soni (Hindi, 2018)
Direction: Ivan Ayr

I always thought that having female-only buses and trains are steps in the wrong direction. We seem to be going back to the dark ages when members of the fairer sex were preferably not seen and not heard. Not only they were handed the dubious title of the root of sins, but they were also killed at birth. Even though we like to think that the ignorant era of jahiliyyah is over, in reality, it is anything but done with.

On the other spectrum, we have people who insist that gender is fluid, that gender expression (identity) is a social construct. They posit that gender is a continuum between masculine and feminine, can vary with time and is different from sexual orientation (attraction). 

Gender studies started as an interdisciplinary academic field to improve female representation in public life and pursue women's equality. Of late, however, the emphasis is more on LGBTQA+ issues rather than fulfilling their original objective, which, sadly, remains unfinished. The world is more interested in getting unisex toilets and giving the right to an individual to change his gender at will (e.g. transwomen)!

In their day-to-day life, the reality on the ground is that despite all the empowerment they have been given over the years, it is far from satisfactory. The slow-moving movie, minus all glitz and pomp often associated with Bollywood film, tells us how women get a raw deal in society. At the centre of the story is Soni, a police sub-inspector. She seems to have gotten through a rough patch with her boyfriend and lives alone in a rented flat. Her neighbour is a nosy but caring older lady who had her way of warding unwelcomed attention from roving eyes of male eyes in her younger days. She wore a sindoor even though she is Muslim. The vermillion gave her protection. Soni is working under a kind female IPS officer who has problems of her own. Working in a male dominant force is no bed of roses. Add that to harassment from VIPs and politicians, at the home front, she is constantly reminded of her ticking biological clock.

Even though the force has assigned the power to Soni to uphold the law, she feels inadequate. The thugs only look at her sex, not the authority that she carries. Even her boyfriend feels she needs his presence to ward off the unsavoury crowd.

It is not all feminism in your face for viewers. In between the story, the screenwriter tells how ladies utilise their so-called vulnerable position for their advantage. A female tenant who is on arrears with her rental accused her landlord of molesting her. She thought she could get away from paying her outstanding rent. Sometimes the weak use their victimhood to their advantage.

Rather than just demanding and demanding more rights for women, advocates for women empowerment should call for a societal change in mindset. It is said that the aetiology of treating women as second class citizens starts with the family itself. Mothers treat their sons as their prized possession and their daughter playing second fiddle to the family needs. Mothers are told to knock in the idea into their sons the female gender need to be respected by example. And Bollywood has its hands tainted for picturising females as objects that need replacement ever so often, whilst the male actors still perform as heroes even at 70. The love interests, however, are young enough to be their granddaughters. 

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Enough of stereotyping already!

The White Tiger (2021)
Netflix

This is your typical Hollywood's stereotyping of Indian society - that the country is dysfunctional, divided by class and wealth. It paints a picture of a place where humanity had died replaced by a selfish group of people who assess the other from the lens of birth, caste and money. Survival of the fittest is the name of the game. Subservience is kept under check with mystical mumbo jumbo about life's purpose and punishment of previous births' sins. Poverty is endemic, so is filth and need for sadhu-like NRI saviours to save the day with the knowledge acquired from 'civilised' nations, so the film portrays. It showcases a world where only criminals and politicians thrive. The rest are merely accidental to make the numbers.

Again and again, these Hollywood flicks paint a stereotypical paint of the whole of India, one of toxic caste division. They reinforce the idea of the fable of Great Indian Rooster Coop of which all the chickens in the coop can see their fellow occupants being slaughtered one by one, yet they are so subservient that they just stick their neck when it time. No, they do not re-tell the story of The Shepherd and his sacrificial lambs!

An erudite once said this about the existence of caste in India. The division of people by caste was a European construct. The caste is not Indian to start with. It is served from the Portuguese/Iberian word 'casta' meaning lineage. In the Hindu tradition, division of people into caste are birth but by qualities. Even within a family, different children are born with variable aptitude or predilection. One may be a scholarly person (a Brahmin in his outlook), another very outdoors and athletic (Kshatriya in quality) or very entrepreneurial with business shrewdness (Vaisha).

On the other hand, some are just hardworking work-horses. It is often quoted of a Brahmin boy, earning a princely sum, working in a multinational leather shoe company after completing his MBA. How can one define his work by birth? Born a Brahmin, academically sound like a Brahmin is typified, indulged in a Vaisha trade, dealing with leathers - an area designated to the low caste! Caste division is more and more looked upon as a British tool to 'divide and rule'.

The division of people is by no means is a construct confined to the Indian society. It is as old as the origin of civilisation itself. Watch 'The Crown' and see how a privileged family who brings nothing in value to the national gross domestic gets all the special treatment in late 1960 as the UK braced itself with austerity drive, scurrying for bail-outs and devaluation of its currency.  See the turn of events at Washington DC following Trump's defeat and appreciate the disparity in the population of the most prosperous nation on Earth. George Floyd's brutal treatment and demise open a dirty bag of the worms of bigotry and racism. 

Nevertheless, I enjoyed the movie for its entertainment value. I liked its atypical narration and the dark theme associated with the story. A person is nice to another because it is the civil thing to do. Or he may need the job. We love our elders and masters behind a facade of loathing, and we loathe them behind the mask of love. People are like pressure cookers. They take in all the heat and beating until such a time that they explode extruding a magma of emotive aggression.

It tells the tale of an ambitious boy from a village who works as a driver with a local gangster cum influencer businessman. He takes all the abuses and denigration until he is told to admit to a hit-and-run automobile accident driven by his boss' wife.

(P.S. This film is an adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Booker-winning novel. With the creative licence, the filmmakers made specific changes to put some stars in a better light to not spoil their image. As pointed by a friend, RV, an erudite critique, the book was written at a time of a different India, in 2008. Much water has passed under that bridge. In the wise words of the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus,  'No man ever steps into the same river twice; for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man'.)

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Every system needs periodical revamp

Rangasthalam ( రంగస్థలం, Theatre, Telugu; 2018)

You think he is alright as your leader. He seems well composed to hear things out. He exudes an aura of confidence. He always has people around him who love him. He gets things done. He must be doing something right. He is even to be personally partaking in religious functions. He appears charitable enough. The same divine forces that govern your life must be the same one that runs his. The Ruler of the world must have sanctioned him to rule over this piece of land.

Then you realise one or two things do not match. It does not seem fair; not proper. You pass it off your own naivety. After all, a person with so much public support and approval cannot be wrong. Then it hits you. Your liberty is snatched away. You scream injustice, but then it dawns upon you the whole administrative machinery has been turned to suit him. You and the ones wronged by the once thought to be the saviour of the land is actually a wolf in sheep's clothing.

You have no recourse to highlight your plight. What do you do? An uprising at the risk of losing everything you have accumulated like a sparrow slowly building its nest? A violent revolution causes the destruction of lives and property. Psyop needs time and resources. What avenue is left when the powers that be controlled the amenities that were created to serve you, anyway.

One website described this movie as one of those movies from South India over the last few years that changed the cinema landscape. This is just baloney. In the 80s, so many movies came out highlighting the nonsensical administration of the village panchayats and the cruelty of the land zamindars. Now it is the cooperatives, that is all. This formula of a lone wolf fighting a corrupt system, coming out unscathed and winning the heart of the beautiful lass is as old as the industry itself. The redeeming factor must be the excellent cinematography and its soothing melodies.

The film tells the story of a young hearing-impaired agricultural worker, who after seeing too many injustices happening under his very nose, takes the Village Cooperative Society President head-on. Mysteriously villagers who opposed the President's decisions committed suicide or went missing. The last straw came when his learned brother was killed when he decided to stand against the President in the local elections.

Can give it a miss but the massive box office earnings and the remake in Kannada may mean that the producers are just riding on its financial success.

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