Skip to main content

Own Conclusions

My one and only trip to Disney was when J was about nine years old. Splash Mountain had been one of our favorite rides. Reading that is had been a controversial ride and needed replacement was quite puzzling. I had no idea of the history of the ride and don't think would care to learn about it either. There seems to be no point in taking an amusement park so seriously - families bring kids there to have a fun time and go on with their lives. All around the park I am sure a person could pick on things to get offended over. 

The whole thing is very Euro-centric so a person like me could take umbrage that my land and culture as ancient as it is does not have a place in Disney. Perhaps, my poor kid will not find a thing to anchor to that speaks to her roots and will come out forever damaged from the experience. And even if India got a spot in Disneyland, I am sure it will not be satisfactory to most Indians. This process of replacing things that have been around historically for good and bad reason with something new and unoffensive has no end. No matter what the replacement is, it is bound to get some set of people feeling upset and excluded. 

Disney has been criticized for racist tropes in films made in earlier decades. The crow characters from the 1941 film “Dumbo” and the King Louie character from 1967’s “The Jungle Book” were viewed as African American caricatures. The depiction of Native Americans in the 1953 movie “Peter Pan” and the Siamese cats — often deemed as Asian stereotypes — from the 1955 film “Lady and the Tramp” also have been derided.

Back home in India, lot of folks were offended by Kipling's Jungle Book because it was deeply disparaging of the natives and made the British out to be the ones to save our heathen souls - a pretty popular opinion outside India too. Notwithstanding, I remember quite fondly how we put up a Jungle Book production for our annual school play when I was about twelve years old. The whole school was involved from set design to costume making, setting up lighting and sound to auditioning for the multitude of roles. At the time, we were too young to have an opinion about Kipling or his racist tendencies - we just had a great time preparing for and putting on the show that allowed us to be creative. It would be great shame if the powers that be had decided Jungle Book need to be canceled and removed from our lives. We had plenty of time left to grow up and come to our own conclusions on the issue - why hurry the process. 

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