Saw Delhi Belly yesterday & loved it! Loved it in its full glory too, with all the gaali-galoch & the urban chutzpah. Finally a comic film for the adults, which actually treats the viewers as adults. Had been following the 'what he said, what they didnt' controversies about the movie for a while now & honestly, am pleasantly surprised that the censor board showed the maturity to actually pass the movie without any strategic 'beeps', inspite of scores willing eagerly to point out that the film is not 'Indian culture'.
The other news I have been following is what the local media here is calling 'a civil rights movement' in India- the Lokpal andolan. While I am completely supportive of the right to a transparent governance, I couldn't help think after the movie yesterday that having some shades of transparency in governance or getting rid of corruption in the upper echelons, could never make our civic society 'liberated'. Many people talk the talk about having a free society- and they define freedom by the freedom of religion, equality, expression etc, but when it comes to actual implementation, one right which is abused more than other fundamental right in our country is the right to individuality. Individuality is the basic tenet of civil rights. And till individuality is not cherished, 'India could never be a land of the free'
Funnily, this is one wrong-doing which we cant blame entirely on the government, as we are wont to do. We Indians are taught to put the family above the individual right from our cradle- when we are born, the mother who bore the pain for 9mths to bring us in the world cannot name us, the right belongs to the grandparents or the myriad relatives.We start going to school & what we read in school-textbooks is not the truth as we actually see it, but what the government sees fit for us to read (even if the course contents look like they belong to our grandparents era & has as much use as that!). As we finish our schooling, most often than not we are deemed unfit to determine our vocation, its our parents who do the honors for us. Whichever novels we read/movies we see, we owe that to some 'upholders' or censors of the moral-society, who ever so magnanimously do us the favor of deciding whether something is 'Indian culture' or not. Nd ofcourse whenever we marry, its again the parents & the society deciding who is worthy to be our life-partner. Thankfully, society has left it upon the individuals to have kids & did not turn it into a collective affair!
Ah yes, we owe a lot to the Bhishma-pitamahs of the society. We have them to thank for deeming us old enough to vote, marry, even have the responsibility of kids at 18 but probably not mature enough to consume alcohol till 25. We have them to thank for for raising the population to a cool 1.2 billion, yet immoral for us to see or hear about sex on-screen or even have a meaningful discussion about it with our parents during our teenage years. We have also them to thank for letting us follow the tenets of any religion, but probably not good enough to criticize any. God save us from these morality-spewing collective do-gooders!
Kudos to the writer of Delhi belly for having the guts to show that every movie doesn't have to be about the kid & his grandmother. Wish we had someone scripting the same in our civil society as well.
