I Love My Slumdog

As Oscar night draws near, Indian furor over Danny Boyle’s acclaimed film, Slumdog Millionaire, reaches a fevered pitch. India is being shown in a bad light! cry Indians who have never set foot in Dharavi or any other slum.

Indeed, they need not be familiar with the slum environment to mount their charge. Their complaint is fundamentally divorced from the question of the accuracy or fairness of Mr. Boyles’s depictions of the lives of slum-dwellers; it is about whether a foreign filmmaker is entitled to tell any story other than “India Shining”. This is a fable last told by the BJP in the 2004 elections. The Indian public didn’t buy it for a minute and, as a result, the BJP was able to snatch a stunning defeat from the jaws of victory. Congress has been running the government ever since.

Liquid Lunch

My travel over the 41 hours stretching from 7:00 am (IST) yesterday to 11:00 am (PDT) later today, breaks into four segments: Pondicherry to Madras, Madras to Bombay, Bombay to Seoul, and Seoul to San Francisco. So by the time I reached Bombay, I reckoned my journey was half over.

How better to celebrate – and spend some of my precious last 10 hours in Bombay – than with a liquid lunch.

Securing Air Passengers against the Threat of Menstruation

Indian airport security is usually pretty lax. Not that they don’t use uniformed military police to check your reservation to allow you admission into the terminal; but generally speaking, entry and egress can be managed easily with a smile and a flimsy excuse. Not that liquids and gels aren’t banned on flights, as elsewhere in the world; but I routinely travel with a liter water bottle, and sometimes my full dop-kit, without being stopped. And one more thing: Sikhs are permitted to travel with swords, which are religious symbols (apparently too valuable to be entrusted to the vagaries of airline baggage handling) as well as unnerving carry-on items.

But as Independence Day approached, and with al Qaeda terror threats on the front page of every newspaper, things got tougher.

Friends Without Borders, Global Rickshaw Style!

Click on image to view video

One of the many awesome experiences in the process of putting together the ill-fated Dil se Dil Independence Day Friendship Celebration was the chance to work with the brilliant Mumbai filmmakers Shivraj Shantakumar and Aparna Wilder, whose award winning film company Wild Kumar makes music videos and television commercials, and whose side project Global Rickshaw does shorts for the NGO community. We were looking for 90 seconds of fun to introduce Friends Without Borders to the television audience at Dil se Dil.

Click on the image above (or here) to see a low-res, high-spirit film about Friends Without Borders by Global Rickshaw, presented in three, unbelievably adorable parts.

If you missed our earlier film, created by Buddy Mukherji of Black Magic Motion Pictures, click here.

Slum Demolition in Mumbai

Yesterday morning, the small slum opposite to Phoenix Mills, in Lower Parel, was razed by the Brihan Mumbai Municipal Corporation.

Slum demolition follows a horrible, regimented protocol. The bulldozers and loaders arrive on site, unannounced. Scores of lathi-swinging policemen swarm in to inform the residents that they have an hour to evacuate belongings before their homes are torn down. The combination of surprise, force, and urgency stifles resistance. There is a resigned powerlessness that has been bred into the manual labor class, and it is as heart-rending to witness as tear-fill despair might have been.

MāM Movies: Independent Filmmaking from the Heart

MāM Movies is all about film and all about energetic Bombay-based filmmakers; but it is not your typical Bombay dream machine. Not a single member of the MāM collective has ever shot an item number. And none has produced their first blockbuster – yet.

Instead, the dedicated young writers, directors, editors, and production technicians who call the 12-foot wide Andheri West walk-up their home-away-from-home (and frequently find themselves sleeping on its narrow roof terrace) are practicing their craft as an instrument of social change.

Friends Without Borders, Reruns

You loved the book, now see the movies.

As we embark on the Phase II of the Friends Without Borders Project, delivering letters of friendship from kids all over India to kids in Pakistan, I want to put our video and presentations at everyone’s easy disposal. I should have done this long ago.

Listed below are links to: our Public Service Announcement Television Commercial, which aired last year throughout India and Pakistan; a short history of Phase I of the project, made by Rahul Brown just before we crossed into Pakistan last year; and two slide presentations introducing our project and the World’s Largest Love Letter events.

Snot: The Canary in Bombay’s Coal Mine

“Mumbai is such a foul city that frequent nose-picking has become compulsory.”

So begins Dilip Radte’s lengthy commentary and first-finger account on the Op-Ed page of yesterday’s Hindustan Times (Mumbai Edition). His point is that dust, grime, and foul air have reached a point where they clog the nose. In truth, at the end of every Mumbai day, I find myself blowing black-shit from my schnoz, just as one does in any other North Indian city, or in New York for that matter.

Radte also puts the prissy and well-mannered – who would turn up their nose at nose-picking – in their place: “The elitist’s only advantage over other Mumbaikars is that they don’t have to pick their noses in public.”

Doing Their Level-Best

If air travel in India sucks, it is generally because India has learned too much from the US and Europe, rather than too little. Sure, there are some distinctively Indian annoyances. Passengers deplane in a mad scrum for the aisle-way, as if they were disembarking a Mumbai commuter train and had someplace to be other than killing time in front of the baggage claim carrousel. And once at baggage claim, travelers press forward with their luggage carts in complete disregard for the inconvenience they cause each other. But generally, the whole process looks all-to-familiar to anyone accustomed to post-9/11 air travel in the US.

And yet, today we found two aspects of Indian air travel that American carriers and the dreadful Transportation Safety Administration would do well to emulate.

Friends Without Borders: Status Report

This has been an exciting two-and-a-half months for the Friends Without Borders. As we make our final preparations to deliver the World’s Largest Love Letter and the first salvo of individual friendship letters from the children of India to the children of Pakistan, it is time to take stock of our achievements and look to the challenges and opportunities ahead.