O companion, what is living without you?
In flowers, in buds, in the streets of love
Without you there is nothing anywhere!
What is living without you?
Oh companion, what is living without you?
-O Saathi Re, Kishore Kumar
Look, we all wanted to have that dance scene. You know the Bollywood film one where you and your forbidden lover are pretend fighting and then suddenly you're in the middle of the verdant Kashmir plains with the Himalayas in the background and you're dancing your little heart out, giggling and peeping from behind a tree.
As I grew up I realised that Bollywood is not the beginning or end of Indian cinema. There are so many other films that express the full range and depth of the lives of people of India, particularly the lives of women explored in sensitive non-patriarchal narratives by both men and women filmmakers. There are films whose stars don't promote skin-lightening creams, who talk about the other issues facing India that as an emerging world super power they might not want to face.
But Bollywood served an important purpose and that was to contemporise age old myths and ex- pectations and reinforce long-held social norms. Any good movement should do that for its people. Whether the standards it chooses to uphold are good ones, well that is a whole other discussion.
And if you can then export your values to other civilisations and spread them through your diaspora, well even better for you. So this week when Huffington Post featured a story about the outrage in India over Aishwarya Rai Bach-chan's weight gain I had to pause for a moment and savour the successes of colonisation in reverse.
For only a minute though. The first instinct of course is to defend poor Aishwarya for doing the human thing and put on weight after having a baby. The second thing is to take a look at how contemporary Western notions of beauty are infiltrating middle-class Indian consciousness. However, it can't be ignored that Aishwarya's appearance was used as a standard for Indian beauty in the first place.
Indian women who don't fit that template, do they even exist? Not as far as Bollywood is concerned. The cookie-cutter appearance of every big Indian film star is kind of like how all the women in ads in Trinidad only get as dark as agency brown or how there is still surprise when a black model is on the cover of Vogue.
As I write this I'm getting ready to go to a protest with some activist friends from India. They're calling on their government to stop work on a largescale nuclear power plant in Koodankulam, a tsunami and earthquake-prone area of South India. From my activist friends I have learned that there are more than 300 people on hunger strike in protest against the construction.
The Indian Government has reacted to the protests by charging more than 55,000 people including 6,500 for sedition and "war against the state" in the last eight months.
There are no stories about this protest in Huffington Post, or any about people in other parts of India, Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean where people are in confrontation with their governments for destroying the environment for the benefit of corpora- tions. Their lives go uncelebrated for the most part. They are invisible and unaccounted for. I guess it's their fault for not being beautiful enough.
But I have no space in my heart to feel sorry for Aishwarya being on the receiving end of the brutality and cruelty of people who, like the rest of us, are being trained not to care about anything else but appearance as a way of valuing people. Who cares if poor Aishwarya is overweight? Who defines what overweight is anyway? She can afford to be if she chooses. She can afford to lose the weight tomorrow. She can pop a pill or change her diet.
Millions of people around the world don't have a choice in what they eat or who they pay for that right. Outside of the cinema the society wants the fantasy to continue. They want their stars to be as infallible as the characters they play. They want a perfect and edited life that is free of thousands who pro-test for the right to clean air. Free of people who don't look like pre-baby Aishwarya smiling and happy and married and perfect.
They don't realise that without the activists there would be no verdant Kashmir plains for their dance scenes, without the farmers there would be no food for them to over-eat. Without the people working and protesting, and dying invisibly in prisons, there would be no planet for them to enjoy.