Skip to main content

India Walk

Watched this documentary made by a British guy who walks across India retracing the steps of the Mahatma and investigating how the events that followed India's independence impacts Indians today. I was not sure what to make of that premise as Smart laid out his itinerary for the road-trip given his stated goals. The man decided the way to do it was to go from Kashmir to Kanya Kumari along the west coast of the country. 

As someone born into a family of refugees from Bangladesh to Kolkata, I had big a problem with this. How can anyone tell a comprehensive story of partition in India without considering what happened in Bengal? So we would need to start by recasting this is a road-trip spanning the Northern and Southern tips of India. That is a valid way to discover some part of India but to pretend it is about exploring the aftermath of Partition is both disingenuous and disrespectful. 

Smart failed to deliver on multiple counts unfortunately - this was not a good road-trip story because he over-emphasized the physical hardships he had to endure at the cost of showing the viewer what India looks and feels like. Traveling that far by foot is expected to be physically demanding so there is no sense in whining about it once a person has made the choice to do things the hard way.  

Perhaps to expatiate colonial guilt Smart is desperate to demonstrate that Gandhi is supremely relevant and revered in India. He is a the happy byproduct of the Empire and that somehow legitimized the British Raj and the likes of Gandhi - and the way the independence was gained. Smart was able to garner some lukewarm liking for the Mahatma but most of the folks he talked to had nothing positive to say about him. With that Smart failed to make the case of the relevance of the Dandi march to present day India and Indians. On all other counts I could not find much to like about this documentary effort. 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more