Hinduism

Draupadi – Will My Spirit Live On?

mandy — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 08:00:00 +0000

On the heels of International Women’s Day, the Indo-American Arts Council in New York City hosted the North American premiere of a unique and thought-provoking Indian play called Draupadi – Will My Spirit Live On? Produced and conceptualized by Shivani Wazir Pasrich, and co-directed by Pasrich and Tina Johnson, Draupadi weaves a tale from the Hindu epic Mahabharata with an intense contemporary story of a woman battling her experience with sexual abuse. The play sheds light on the plight of many women suffering such abuse, connecting a mythological tale with a modern parallel, and delivers a mostly engaging experience.

The play extends the story of Draupadi (played by Pasrich), from her travails that were supposed to have triggered a great war, crossing centuries to meet Maaya (Charu Shankar) in modern day India. Draupadi is stuck between heaven and earth, pondering her fate and choices, and being guided by her confidant Lord Krishna. Maaya is a young housewife who is taken advantage of by her husband Arjun’s brother Kaurav, and is too afraid of societal taboos to fight for justice. Added into the mix is Krishna, who flits in and out of situations donning various avatars to help guide the two women in distress towards finding peace with their own respective scenarios.

One of the play’s greatest strengths is in its talented and accomplished cast. Pasrich as Draupadi exudes confidence and power in her quest for salvation and also helping Maaya out of her predicament. She does, however, remain angry throughout, thus affecting the depth of the character. Shankar plays Maaya with a dignified innocence and is quick to gain audience sympathy.

The most spirited performance comes from Dilip Shankar as Krishna, portraying a deity with an edge. He provides the comic relief in many tense scenes and dishes out ample doses of tough love that would come from any respected mentor, heavenly or human. Among the rest of the cast, Arjun Fauzdar as Maaya’s husband Arjun and Ashish Paliwal as Sukarna are both competent in their roles.

When asked about the genesis of the play, Pasrich explained, “It’s just essentially that, as women, we judge ourselves very harshly and we expect ourselves to perform so many different roles. And we do it happily with a smile. But at the end of the day we realize everybody’s going through the same kind of situation, our issues are similar, and there’s a great strength that you get out of that. So that was the reason to bring [Draupadi] into the current times because, if anyone’s had a difficult life, it’s Draupadi. So whoever today is having a tough time, it couldn’t be tougher than Draupadi’s life and if she moved on, so can everyone else.”

Draupadi – Will My Spirit Live On? is an important work of theatre for confronting through the arts an issue that plagues Indian society today. It is a show to be watched and lauded – such artistic confrontations of social plagues need only be encouraged.

Read the full review at The NRI

Written by: Pulkit Datta, April 19th 2011

Goddess Durga and Sacred Female Power

mandy — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Laura Amazzone

Hamilton Books

Author Laura Amazzone offers her own intimate experiences (including the most painful ones) and personal growth in a book that is richly dense with information and observation. Goddess Durga and Sacred Female Power encompasses spirituality, mythology, feminism, history, travel, and philosophy. Nearly every paragraph made me set the book down to consider or visualize ideas. In a very tight nutshell: Amazzone delves into the multicultural history and symbolism of this incarnation of the Goddess, offering a model of spirituality and feminism to a world that greatly needs it.

I must say here that I identify as an atheist and feminist. Because I personally cannot believe that the entire universe was created by a deity, unsurprisingly, some concepts and language in this book did not attract me; however, my mind is always open to be engaged. I eagerly boarded Amazzone’s train for female empowerment and higher consciousness.

Though I’m not religious, spirituality and mythology fascinate me. I have always wanted to learn more about goddesses and female deities, and the depth of traditions and storytelling surrounding the Goddess Durga is worth its weight in gold. I would love to see the ten-day Durga Puja and visit the goddess' temples. This book enlightened, inspired, and encouraged me to venture outside of what I had previously known.

Amazzone’s personal pain was parallel with my own. She generously shared her physical and emotional pain, and how she was able to heal through spiritual comfort. This is a journey many of us can relate to and benefit from sharing.

Goddess Durga and Sacred Female Power would be of great interest to academics, spiritualists, and those interested in personal growth. The rest of us may want to stick with Women Who Run with the Wolves for personal guidance.

Written by: Jacquie Piasta, January 26th 2011

Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India

admin — Sun, 09 May 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Kalyani Devaki Menon

University of Pennsylvania Press

Everyday Nationalism, a publication in "The Ethnography of Political Violence" series, offers readers a provocative and sometimes disturbing look at Hindu nationalist organizations and the role of Indian women in representing the nationalist movement. Kalyani Devaki Menon conducted her principal fieldwork in and around Delhi from January 1999 to January 2000, acting as a participant observer; interviewing women activists; visiting schools and training camps associated with the movement; and taking part in women's education classes, meetings, rallies, and protest marches. She reports that “gender and sexuality were pivotal to the narratives of self and 'other' produced by the women” she worked with, and that women played a crucial role in building the broad-based support for the movement that brought the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) into power from 1998 to 2004.

The nationalist movement in India remains powerful, drawing thousands of women and men to accept a sociopolitical vision that is “xenophobic, exclusionary, and tremendously violent,” a view of India that sees Muslims and Christians as invaders, defilers both of Hindu women and the sacred soil itself, the body of the goddess Bharat Mata (Mother India). Hindu nationalists assert the need for “violent reclamations of Hindu masculinity” and for vengeance on outsiders who have violated the honor of Hindu women. Menon asserts, "This gendered construction of history, that perpetuates the logic of revenge, is widely promulgated to young female recruits, and remains central to mobilizing support for the politics and actions of the movement today." She makes clear to readers that she disagrees with this policy, yet she does not comment directly on the horrible irony of a politic that encourages Hindu youth to rape Muslim women and Christian nuns as payback for the sexual assaults said to have been enacted on Hindu women now and in the past.

The image of women as vulnerable victims is somewhat offset within the movement's various organizations by efforts to strengthen and toughen girls and women. Camp sessions include military drill, endurance training, yoga, and rough physical games. Women are taught to overcome their fears and to defend themselves. One woman activist said, “Girls today want to be free. We ask them, do you want to be free or strong?” Hindu nationalists criticize the desire to be free like Western or feminist women, claiming Indian women should be strong in order to serve the Hindu state, but still subservient to their husbands and male leaders. In Hindu societies, women are traditionally seen as “mothers, wives, and caretakers of their families.” Nationalists consider the whole Hindu nation to be an extended family, and in this context, women find reasons for civic activism: they become, in a sense, mothers of the nation.

Most Indian women marry, and many Hindu women nationalists are married, but many activists in the movement are either female renouncers; religious sadhvis, who give up worldly attachments but remain political; or pracharikas, unmarried celibate female volunteers who devote all their energies to the movement. A number of other women activists are widows or separated from their husbands. In a sense, the political organizations to which they belong become their families. Women find a favorite role model in a historical figure, Queen Jijabai, mother of the Hindu king Shivaji in the seventeenth century. Male historians concentrate on Shivaji himself, but the women nationalists portray Jijabai as an “enlightened mother” who played a key role in the nation's destiny by inculcating Hindu values in her son.

Menon's witness is compelling because she acts as intermediary between the people she studies and her readers, who need to understand what's going on in the crucial Indian subcontinent. Just as she translates Hindi texts into English, she explains many customs and beliefs that may be unfamiliar to non-Hindus. I found her presentation enormously helpful and would recommend _Everyday Nationalism _to anyone interested in religious movements, rightist politics, or both.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, May 9th 2010

Transcendent in America: Hindu-Inspired Meditation Movements as New Religion

admin — Sat, 08 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Lola Williamson

New York University Press

Although I don’t do it every day, yoga and meditation help me manage physical and mental injuries that I received from previous trauma. It certainly calms my chaotic mind and keeps pain at bay. I have bonded with other practitioners, but I’ve never gone on a retreat or invested time in training beyond basic poses or ten minute meditations. My expectations of what Lola Williamson’s book about meditation movements in the U.S. were modest at best, as a result of my limited experiences with it.

The practice of meditation, and following a guru, to the point of making it a lifestyle is commonplace in America. It’s been going on for far longer than I had assumed, and suffice to say, Transcendent in America breaks down a lot of my previous assumptions. Mainstream media gives so much press to the evangelical Christians that there is little room for other faiths. Williamson does not create a polar comparison of traditional American Christian denominations and the Hindu-Inspired Meditation Movements (HIMM), but provides similarities along with differences, and suggests that the definition of religion itself is changing.

HIMMs, like institutionalized Christianity, are no stranger to corruption and the sexual abuse of followers (particularly minors). Like the Roman Catholic Church, HIMMs have a history of either covering up or downplaying cases of child abuse within its groups. Religious or spiritual organizations need to devise systems of checks and balances to deal with their hierarchies and potential corruption.

The issue of spirituality is gray, not black or white, and Transcendent in America argues this point well. Each individual is the determining factor in whether to embrace HIMM, traditional religion, or none at all. Interview excerpts are provided to show the diverse nature of people in America who succeed or fail at their perspective choices of faith. Whatever they choose, followers look to religion for similar reasons, including a sense of security, collective inclusion, and direction.

Decisions are based on so many uncontrolled variables—such as environment, background, and mental health—that even current science cannot measure or validate individual experiences involving meditation. Williamson shows that is okay, because it isn’t about clinical research, it’s about finding balance between the material and spiritual worlds.

I do not foresee myself exploring 'Eastern'-style meditation further by reading some of the writings of various gurus or joining an ashram any time soon, but thanks to Transcendent in America, I have developed a better sense of the complexities and history behind the Westernized form of yoga I participate in. It’s also given me a deeper understanding of how diverse America’s spiritual tapestry has become and how it continues to grow.

Written by: Nicolette Westfall, May 7th 2010

The Hindus: An Alternative History

admin — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:32:00 +0000

By Wendy Doniger

Penguin Press

Wendy Doniger, currently the most outstanding American scholar of Hinduism, serves us a feast of tasty historical events and interpretative myths in this rich curry of a book, covering social and cultural developments in the Indian subcontinent from prehistoric times to the modern day. It is an “alternative history” in that it concentrates on the interactions between the religious texts and rituals created mainly by those whom Gurcharan Das calls “Dead Male Brahmins” and the alternative peoples Doniger finds so significant in the evolution of the multiform Hindu tradition, such as lower-castes, women, Buddhists, Muslims.

Doniger’s themes include violence versus nonviolence towards humans and animals, tensions between the worldly “householder life” and ascetic renunciation, the desire to obtain a good rebirth on earth and the desire to avoid rebirth altogether. She emphasizes the Hindu sense of time, the feeling that things that happened in the past are the source of things happening now, that the past comes to fruition in the present, and the value of oral traditions in preserving variant voices in society. She maintains the importance of the history of ideas and the stories that express those ideas: “For we are what we imagine, as much as what we do.” Tales of animals are especially vital in Hindu mythology, and she recounts many different stories in which animals such as horses, cows, tigers, monkeys, dogs and an occasional cat play key roles. Gods even become incarnate as animals and are associated with particular animals, such as Shiva with his bull, Nandi.

Another important focus of Doniger’s work is the representation of the female gender, whether in animals or women, goddesses or ogresses. From the ancient myth of the doomsday mare in the depths of the sea, , to the rise of popular worship of the dark goddess Kali, the female in Hindu mythology is dangerous and must be controlled and propitiated. Doniger argues that there is “an inverse correlation between the powers of goddesses or supernatural women in texts and natural women on the ground.” The female divinities of India can be divided into goddesses of the breast, peaceful wives and mothers, and goddesses of the tooth, unmarried, independent of male control, often killers. Doniger finds that the situation in India, in general, destroys “the pious hope of goddess feminists” that the worship of goddesses is a good thing for women. The powers attributed to goddesses have not encouraged men to grant to women, or women to seize from men, greater political and economic powers. Indeed, the shakti or creative power seen as inherent in women leads men to try harder to control women, to silence them, except for those rebel women who defy convention and allow themselves to be possessed by the spirit of the fierce goddesses.

Doniger devotes considerable attention to the development of the custom of suttee, or burning wives on the funeral pyres of their husbands, along with other abuses such as female infanticide and the dowry murders of daughters-in-law still occurring in modern India. She notes that some eyewitnesses give evidence of widows who seemed willing to go to the pyre and others of widows forced to sacrifice themselves, adding that the voice we most want to hear is missing: “the voice of the woman in the fire.” We can never hear the testimony of the women who wanted to die and did, whether for pragmatic or religious reasons. The ritual itself arises from the mythology linking women and fire in the cycle of marriage, death, and rebirth.

The final chapters of this impressive study analyze the political and religious activities of Mahatma Gandhi, the efforts to reform or repeal the caste system, the migration of Hindus and Hinduism to England and America, and the political and religious controversies in present-day India. The Hindu goddesses continue to evolve: in Kerala in 2008 the goddess Bhagavati paid a ceremonial visit to her “twin sister,” the Virgin Mary, at a near-by church. Meanwhile the women painters of Mithila, who traditionally made wall and floor paintings in their homes for marriages and other domestic rituals, have begun to make and sell similar paintings on paper to art collectors in India and around the world. In spite of conflicts, the rich diversity of the Hindu culture is moving forward to a promising future.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, June 23rd 2009

Slumdog Millionaire (or I Want to Sue the Indian Government: Memories of Gods, Lovers, and Slumdogs)

admin — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 10:29:00 +0000

Directed by Danny Boyle

Fox Searchlight Pictures

An old Native American curse goes like this, “May all your dreams come true!”

For many years, I had a dream; I wanted very badly to visit mysterious India. Last month my wish unexpectedly came true. Forbidden Sun Dance, my most recent documentary, was selected to compete in the Tri-Continental Human Rights Film Festival in India. This was a great opportunity to discover the land of my dreams.

While on tour with the festival, I was invited to watch Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire in a fancy movie theatre in the dazzling and enormous city of Mumbai by a lovely Bollywood moviemaking couple.

I had never seen such a theatre anywhere in North America! For double the ticket price, you get a seat in which you can actually lie down! Superbly comfortable, they were a bit like those huge massage chairs that I had seen in shopping malls in Canada.

I felt very strange sitting in that chair, munching on popcorn and watching not a fantasy-filled Bollywood movie, but a somewhat more realistic portrayal of life in India...

Bollywood – My Childhood Love

As a little girl growing up in Iran, and like millions of others living in Eastern countries, I loved Bollywood movies. They were all colour and glamour and rosy pictures of India, that heaven on earth; the country of love and flowers.

In my childish imagination, Bollywood’s India was the best place on the planet to live and be in love. For hours, my cousins and I would sit watching Bollywood movies and later try to imitate those gorgeous Indian actresses.

We would draw moles between our eyebrows and put on lots of makeup stolen from our mothers. We would wrap Granny’s colourful hijab around our bodies and pretend it was a sari while dancing along with the actresses and lip syncing all the songs that we knew by heart without understanding more than few words!

We all wanted to steal the heart of the main actor, Amitabh Bachchan. He was the most gorgeous man ever: tall, handsome, and an amazing dancer, he was our superbly passionate romantic hero who would do anything for love and justice—at the same time! A true prince charming. I would have done anything (and I mean anything) to get his attention if he ever showed up in my neighbourhood in Tehran!

In that way, I was just like little Jamal in Slumdog Millionaire.

The end of happiness

Our happy days didn’t last long. The new Islamic regime in Iran robbed us of our childhood joys and fantasies. For girls to sing and dance became a crime against humanity, akin to adultery. Being seen to be in love, like those pretty Bollywood actresses, was to risk being stoned to death in the name of their angry and misogynist god.

Although owning a video player was a crime with a harsh punishment, we continued to keep our player and watch Bollywood movies in our basements. But this couldn’t help us to forget the cruel realities taking place outside our doors. Thousands of young Iranian revolutionaries were massacred by the new Islamic regime, which conducted a never-ending war with neighbouring Iraq, using the war as a tool to quell internal political dissent.

My childhood became nothing more than blood and hopelessness. Even Bollywood movies were powerless to bring the colour back to the dark reality that Iran had become.

I wanted a way out, something to offer the hope and fantasy that a lost teenager like me craved. Again India came through, this time with books not movies, and with a rational for what we went through. Apparently, this was our karma. We should not complain; we should accept the life that we had and be thankful in order to come back in a better situation, for instance in Switzerland or even the India as we pictured it from Bollywood movies.

I envied Indians, with their hundreds of gods. But they were more than happy to offer them to the world even a hopeless Iranian teenage girl like me. I could actually choose to believe or worship whatever god I wanted. To my surprise, the Indian gods could not change my life; they only could help me to live it more happily by changing my thoughts! In the darkness that was Iran, I was looking for a god who was less furious and violent than the one imposed on us by force after the 1979 revolution, the god of lashing, killing, stoning, war and absolute control over all, especially the guiltiest—women!

I longed to discover a happier god, a less harmful god, a god with more forgiveness and compassion. Above all, I longed for the god who would let us sing and dance—so I chose Krishna. After all, a god who would steal butter as a child couldn’t be so hard on others, right? So I chanted for Krishna: hare Krishna hare Krishna Krishna Krishna hare hare. Unfortunately our relationship didn’t last long; Krishna seemed simple to follow at first, but was too restrictive for women, even more restrict than the god at home to whom granny would pray three times a day.

As I flowered into a young woman, I found an Indian guru named Osho whose philosophies amazed me. The sexual liberty that he encouraged his followers to experience in the name of spirituality would attract any young woman living in a restricted Muslim country!

Then along came Buddha, a very popular figure with my generation. The Buddha’s philosophy was to meditate to find both internal and external peace, even while living in a violent society. My friends adored him, but I always had my reservations. Experiencing inner and outer peace in a country that hanged people in front of us on the way back from school simply wasn’t an option for me. Buddhism was too hard to understand or practice during the violent, horrifying times we were experiencing in Iran.

No, Buddha wouldn’t work for me. I couldn’t accept the misery that I had been living in for most of my life in exchange for the hope for a better life in my next body.

Losing Faith in All My Lovers

Sadly, I was losing my faith in the Indian gods. I felt like they were old lovers. I still liked to carry their pictures and had a wish to meet them in India one day, but I could not follow them anymore. We were too different, we had grown apart, and our paths were no longer the same.

I needed to get out, to have some space, to leave my childhood neighbourhood behind. The place that I had lived for so many years, the place where I had my dreams and thoughts about Amitabh Bachchan, Krishna, Osho, and Buddha for many nights, no longer felt like my home...

Finding Them in a New Home

I was surprised to find out how popular Eastern spirituality was among the middle- and upper classes in Western countries, including the country that I entered as a refugee: Canada. The lost generation found themselves in a modern, hectic world, and were critical of churches. This generation was looking towards the unknown for answers, looking for the devil they didn’t know to replace the one they knew. No doubt the countless Indian gods provided a rich buffet of choice for Westerners with wide-ranging appetites who loved to keep their "options open".

Most of my Canadian friends, and even some Iranian old leftists, would follow some new age spiritual path, god, guru or lama. They would always report a flawless image of their newfound system of old Eastern beliefs. Hundreds of dollars would be spent buying books, going to retreats and workshops, and attending the speeches of a guru or lama visiting from India who were willing to receive their offerings. Generous donations would be made for building a new ashram or temple under the names of their masters somewhere in their own city or back in the motherland. Of course, the structure had to be better and more glamorous than those consecrated to competing deities.

In all honesty, I have always been very impressed by Indians. Their brain really works in any area that they focus; perhaps it’s something in their tasty spicy food! What is clear is that they have succeeded well at selling their gods, gurus, and lamas to Westerners as they have been in selling Bollywood pictures to Easterners for generations. But I had my own confusions about India. Exposed for years to India through their successful movie marketing and convincing spirituality, I always thought that there must be more to the land of my dreams than that—a real India to discover with my own eyes.

Arriving in My Land of Dreams

Leaving the crowded Delhi airport, which had been placed on a high security alert after the terrorist attacks of a few days previously, the first thing which struck me was all the poverty that I saw. I couldn’t believe my eyes! Hundreds of people living on the streets of Delhi; babies crawling dusty roads, eating garbage alongside of dogs, cats, and cows, and ignored by ordinary people who would walk right by them pretending they didn’t exist.

No Escape from Reality

Delhi was nightmare become reality; there was no escape. Unlike many other countries where you would see poverty only in ghettos, the poor in India are everywhere. Slums full of people exist even within the wealthy neighbourhoods. There was not a moment I was able to pretend that the poor didn’t exist, except places like the unbelievably beautiful academic buildings built during British colonial era or the Western-style shopping malls and restaurants where the poor are not allowed to enter. Even there, it didn’t matter that I couldn’t see them. The poor were with me and I couldn’t ignore their presence even for a moment.

It’s not that I was completely naive before going to India. Deepa Mehta’s Elements trilogy Trilogy had introduced me to the terrible poverty, the inhumane discrimination against women, the injustice, the hypocrisy, and the corruption. But what I encountered in person was beyond what I had seen in my wildest imaginings.

A sad smile would attract many children, each begging with those beautiful eyes for some mercy. I have never felt more hopeless, and in those moments I began to understand why tourists are advised to totally ignore the people on the street. But the warnings always said it was about safety—tourists needed to be ‘safe.’

Safe? These homeless children were the safest people I have ever known. They just seemed so dehumanised and hopeless, exactly like me standing before them. They were kind, harmless, and polite. They would see my camera and were more than happy to pose for a few meagre rupees without me even asking. Their lives seemed so totally integrated with Bollywood that their reality became shaped by it.

Feeding the Temple, Forgetting the Kids

I went to a small village in Rajasthan where they were building more than seven new ashrams a short distance from each other. I couldn’t imagine how much money would be spent on those gardens and buildings and on the enormous statutes of Buddha, Shiva, or any of the other Indian gods that would stand in the front of the buildings.

I asked, and received some answers. These temples were mostly being built and paid for by Indian spiritual leaders living in Western countries using donations from their follower’s pockets.

I visited Iskan, the Hare Krishna temple to see just a few aged Western devotees chanting. Apparently the Hare Krishnas are not as popular now as during their heyday in the '60s and '70s when The Beatles had turned to them. Buddha is all the rage now in the West. Krishna has become an old fashioned, hippie god.

Many poor Indians chanted—hare Krishna hare Krishna Krishna Krishna hare hare—outside the temple, hoping to attract some rich tourist’s sympathy—and perhaps a few spare rupees. It was hurtful and shameful to read the thoughts so clearly reflected in their eyes: “Yes, you are here on a pilgrimage to find your Indian god, but I also exist in India. Please make a donation here in my bowl, and I will promise to pray on behalf of you to any of my gods that you ask. Hare Krishna!”

I couldn’t understand why, in a country where thousands of temples already exist in all different sizes, shapes, and forms, there is need for Westerners to build more temples? Could these spiritual fanatics not see all this poverty? Did they believe that they could worship these new gods from within a safe Western bubble while ignoring the people on the streets who also believe in and worship the same god? What about building schools for the millions of street kids? Or how about providing shelters for the people who are born and die in the dirt of your newfound holy land?

I always knew there was poverty in India, but I naively thought that with the huge amount of money pouring in from all over the world through the spiritual tourist market and from Bollywood into a booming and wealthy city like Mumbai (which apparently has the most millionaires on the planet) more would have been done for the poor.

Ghandi vs. Mao?

I met an Indian businessman who had traveled all over the world, but was based in China. He strangely thought that Ghandi’s democracy had done more wrong that good for India.

I fought back. I think what Ghandi had done for this country no guru, lama, or contemporary communist dictator could do—so maybe India needs another Ghandi rather than a Chinese dictator. The businessman continued to compare his country to China and decided that the Chinese had dealt with poverty better than India ever had. He used the 2008 Olympics (China had put all the poor behind a wall), as an example.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing! He was suggesting that the poor should be kept behind walls to protect tourists from exposure to the reality of misery. In a country with eighty percent its population in poverty, the government would have a hell of a job building enough walls to contain them all. Of course, this would have the benefit of leaving lots of space for the minority of privileged Indians, Bollywood stars, the wealthiest of the Zoroastrian Parsis, and of course, foreigners on spiritual pilgrimages or working for NGOs while living in five-star hotels.

I thought the only thing that India might learn from the Chinese would be to change their strict adoption laws so that the thousands of childless Westerners who are in line to receive a baby from China could adopt children from the streets of Delhi instead, and give them the love that they deserve.

I Want to Sue the Indian Government

Visiting the real India, not the one you see in tourist ads at your travel agency’s office, shattered my fantasies of the mysterious country I had always dreamed of one day visiting.

Who is responsible for the injustice that is India? Is it Bollywood, for producing distorted fantasy images for the world? India’s spiritual leaders who deceive millions of ingenuous westerners? Tourist agencies with their mind blowing exotic ads?

No, it is more likely the fault of the Indian government that tolerates savage injustice and disparity of wealth. Would it be possible, I fantasize, to sue the government of India on behalf of the millions of Indian street children who receive nothing from all the fame and wealth that India receives and enjoys? Could I seek a remedy before some court requiring those who control of the amazing, sacred land of India and who exploit it for their personal interest must share the wealth by actually contributing to India’s infrastructure and the health of its people? Surely, a country of such wealth and international fame can do something to address the abysmal poverty that surely has shocked more than one visitor into a helpless, suicidal funk.

India: the Beauty Within

I saw many beautiful things in India. I experienced real multiculturalism. Millions of different cultures and religions live and work together, while most countries in the region persecute minorities and permit no freedom of religion.

I witnessed democracy and freedom of speech at work when I saw a disabled person make a claim against the film festival in which I was participating for selecting a wheelchair unfriendly building in which to show the films. His claims caused the cancelation of the festival in the city of Goa, one of the five cities to which the festival would have traveled. It was somewhat ironic that in a country populated by millions of disabled poor living on the streets, one privileged and high-caste man could stop a highly organized human rights event.

I met some of the most amazing, generous, and peaceful people that I had ever met anywhere. I met hardworking, critical, but hopeful women activists and artists with a passion for justice that I rarely see. I met village women who would work hard on farms or in brick factories, while also making beautiful handicrafts in the hope that tourists would buy them.

There were the young, promising, intelligent Indian college students who harboured great dreams for their country and rest of the world. Some talked to me about their concerns about hostility with neighbouring Pakistan. They were worried about the possibility of war between people who one day could belong to the same land; they were disappointed with a corrupt government that is more concerned with building a war machine than with fighting poverty.

Seeing Forgotten Slum Children, But Not a Slumdog Millionaire

After a few days in India, I was sad to conclude that Slumdog Millionaire portrays an India much closer to the real thing than my childhood Bollywood movies represented. Even the theatre in which I watched Danny Boyle’s film seemed to exist in a surreal and glamorous Bollywood neighbourhood that was completely outside of the orbit of India’s reality. For me, although *Slumdog Millionaire's images were closer to reality, the rags-to-riches storyline was wildly improbable for any of the millions of India’s slum-dwelling girls and boys.

In a society of caste hierarchies that have deadly effect on the 'untouchables’—the absolute lowest caste who mostly live on the street—making a superstar out of a street urchin and providing him with a happy ending was copied from the Hollywood-Bollywood models, a fantasy provided by the same image-making machine that has always fed like a parasite on human hope for love, equality, and fairness. Yet I am still pleased with the film since it actually happened in a real Indian city and not in some surreal Bollywood set that most would think to be India.

Not-Happy-Ending to My Love Story

My best friend from Canada, who was visiting her parents in Mumbai, kindly took me around her childhood neighbourhood: the Juhu Beach areas of glamour and fame. We passed by Amitabh Bachchan’s house, the childhood favourite I shared with Slumdog Millionaire's main character. It was Republic Day and a big crowd waited anxiously for the moment when the big star would show up and give autographs to his fans.

I had no desire to meet him in person anymore, feeling I had been fooled enough by his movies as a child. Worse, huge images of him on commercial billboards all over India showed him using his fame to hawk everything from designer suits to Basmati rice, the luxuries that many of his poor fans could never hope to afford, in this life at least.

We have both changed. He is much older now—still handsome, but looking very conservative. There is no sign of the passionate man as I remember him from the old days, the man who would do anything for love and justice. I have also changed. I no longer believe in Prince Charming or the sweet fantasy of India that I used to know through his films.

Written by: Lila Ghobady, March 31st 2009