Musings of an Idiot

Firaaq

'Firaaq' was a moving experience in many ways - first up was the fact that in India we don't like to see the reality of things around us and the movie does exactly that - it puts a mirror in front of us. The second it was a very unconventional movie and it was beautifully filmed as well. Most of the performances were spot on and the only thing that could have done with some improvement was the pacing - which tends to lag in places. I liked the movie a lot despite some small niggles.

The movie did create a lot of discussion in the 'Q & A' session after the screening and one particular gentleman was rambling on how the movie needed to explore other riots and also show 2 sides of the coin. He seemed to miss the point entirely because the 2002 Gujarat riots were aided by the local state machinery{the party in power was a right wing political party whose mainstay to power is 'hindutva'} including police and that caused a deep division in the society. The whole topic obviously made me angry at the hypocrisy that we have in Indian society and one of the people I know commented thus on my anger at the way things are in India: "None of the Indian Film Makers tried to promote the qualities of Indian culture, its richness , uniqueness or its diversity.They just wanna earn dollors exposing India to its extreme side.Discrimination and spineless middle class is there all over the world. Still india is largest democratic country in the world. Firaaq is made for awards and recognitions. Firaaq film makers should have selected better subject to get international exposure...."

And my response to it was:
"I disagree with you on that 'xyz' {name of the person}. It's easy being patriotic and try to bring everything under 'culture,richness,diversity' but the truth is that in India we are discriminatory but don't want to acknowledge it. What don't we discriminate on? Caste? Class? Religion? Region? Language? And worst of all - Skin colour- for chrissake. I think the world has seen enough bollywood movies to see the 'normal' side of India.

As far as Firaaq is concerned - no one actually makes a movie for the sake of getting awards and recognition or international recognition {btw - which film maker doesn't want international recognition????} - that's the silliest thing I've heard. You make a movie because you want to say something. Just because it is not a mainstream movie without the A-list actors or 'song & dance' sequences, don't dismiss it. I think it puts a mirror in front of us and people don't like to see themselves for what they really are."

And that's exactly what I mean - as a society we tend to dismiss anything that doesn't directly impact on us as 'a dark and unnecessary topic' that needs to be buried and not discussed or dealt with {especially if it deals with such a difficult subject as religion}. No wonder India is such a passive aggressive nation which tends to burst into random acts of violent implosion which harms the society a shitload more than it heals. I am not saying that India is the only country full of problems but we do tend to make it worse by all the various forms of discrimination that we practise in the society. There is a lot of good in the society but there is an equal amount of bad and as long as we tend to ignore the later fact we'll always have a fractured and troubled society. India is supposed to be a secular country and every act of social and domestic violence just proves otherwise.

NZ has it's own set of problems and they are not pretty subjects to deal with either but films on such topics do get made here and some of them are commercial as well as critical successes (and those movies didn't get made to just win awards). NZ is in a transitionary phase where it has been actively dealing with it's troubled past and issues for some time now. I say transitionary because we are still no closer to resolving the issues but the thing is that we are trying to deal with it and not simply ignoring it altogether. The problems (in some cases) are not of the same magnitude that we face in India, which become even more magnified in the light of the huge population in India combined with lack of social support systems, but still we are atleast looking them in the face in NZ and not turning our backs on them.

Amit
P.S - I just realized that I wrote 'we' for describing my points of view on both NZ as well as India - mainly because I still feel I belong to both the countries {I guess that's reflected by my NZ citizenship and my Indian overseas citizenship}

Labels: NZ Film Festival

posted by Amit @ 8:06 AM