If you were wondering where the term poverty porn that everybody seems to be using without attribution came from, Alice Miles seems to have used that term first.
Amitabh, who is also the subject of the film has a lot to say about the controversy with one Nirpal Dahliwal at Guardian. You have to agree with Nirpal about the general escapism of contemporary bollywood cinema – most of which are set in some hip place like South Africa or Australia these days and Rock On was probably worst among them – although I must admit thinking of my younger days and deriving some vicarious pleasures (sorry Mahesha if you’re reading this).
I’m sure there will be more controversy once this hits the multiplexes next week.
We watched the movie yesterday and found it gripping and entertaining. While this is not the first movie about Indian poverty made by a white man, it’s one of the more successful ones. I was particularly curious about the Indian reaction. I spent an hour or so reading up above the movie.
It’s hard to not notice Mumbai Socialites like Shobha De criticizing the Hollywood types for not “acknowledging” the mega industry that’s also called Bollywood. Smells a lot like the other common Indian complaint about Mohandas Gandhi not getting a Noble peace prize. My reaction to all of this is: if you really want to announce that India has arrived on the global scene, start a Dhirubhai award or something and make Europeans and North Americans covet it, instead of the other way around.
The thing that stands out is, apart from Rehman, other winners weren’t Indian. Dev Patel or Freida Pinto didn’t win any awards for example – although they did justice to their roles I thought. The scene when Jamal gets kicked in the eye after the Mercedez is broken into and the subsequent exchange:
Jamal: This is the real India
White couple: This is the real America
kinda gives away the biases of the director and the screen writer.
The other scene that most people are not going to forget for a long long time is the scene where the young Jamal falls into an open shit-pit, while trying to get an autograph from Amitabh (no wonder he’s upset). Makes me wonder if Arundhati Roy had anything to do with that particular scene (cf. passage from the God of small things: the smell of shit hovered over the city … like a hat).
What’s up with all these Mangalorean Christian hotties winding up in the movie industry these days 
There’s been a bunch of noise about carbon footprint and electronic equipment in the press lately. As I was trying to catch up, my laptop reminded me that something was taking up a bunch of CPU. Now that I don’t use a desktop anymore, I can literally “feel the heat” when it’s not happy.
Invariably, it’s some anti-virus thing trying to download some “update” or “scanning” my computer for files to “quarantine”. Got me thinking – if you count the zillions of computers and the compute cycles used by these programs, the carbon footprint might beat a lot of web 2.0 companies handily.
The recession and the slump in revenue collection seems to be making counties become super aggressive in revenue collection on law abiding citizens while doing nothing to fight rising crime. My most recent experience: a $100 parking ticket on a state highway which had 50 other cars parked on the shoulder.
So the next time you drive past Manteca/Sonora on highway 120/108 towards Dodge Ridge or Strawberry, CA – beware of these scams. However careful you are, it’s next to impossible to avoid paying the moment you get out of your car. The choice is between local businesses or the local government.
We had a lot of fun though and appreciated how some of the people over there readily shared their snow sleds with us first timers.
This was a brand new DV5t. The SD card reader just died. And I’m not alone in this. HP’s standard response: send us the laptop and we’ll fix it for free. Not worth the time and money. So next time you’re ready to a pay a premium for HP vs Dell, think twice. They both use the same cheap components.
We went snow playing yesterday in the mountains. I had a lot of fun throwing snow balls at my dad.
