Thousands of Movies Like This?

So I got my wish, and finally got to see an Indian movie that explains how a business grows, just that the venture was a FERA-Era relic that relied more on licences than branding to survive.

But then, Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (Thousands of Wishes Like This) did more than to explain the entrepreneural spirit before Suzuki; it explained, or tried to explain, how democratic India devolved itself into a banana republic in those wasteful Emergency years. The forced sterilisation programme wasn't of able-bodied young men, but of a young, adolescent nation still trying to find its voice; it rationally rams down your throat that, when you don't police an authoritarian government, the only two clashing political ideologies are a brutal application of force and the lack of it. Our generation's greatest triumph, then, is not just that we can strike for mundane reasons, but that we can discuss socialism's, and militant-communism's, futility, in a mundane setting. Staggering to imagine that this wasn't so a mere twenty-five years back.

However, what is, indeed, truly interesting is not just the film's actual narrative, but its localised-narrative (petit-recit), as it were. It is true, you begin to think, as the movie suggests, it is possible to see two India's; one where heroines are pale-skinned, and wear what the front-benchers want, and another where heroines are brown-skinned, and wear what the character wants. One speaks chaste Hindi, while the other speaks an easy mix of English, Hindi and, amusingly enough for the movie, pidgin Telugu. One is known to half the world, and is a billion-rupee industry; the other is known only to film-buffs, and still sometimes seeks governmental help to survive. One is seductive, the other is attractive. One is an aspiration, another an inspiration.

I'll leave you to muse on that cinematic irony.