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:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

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