Kitsch

There are many surprises in this world. Every time I turn around a corner, surprise stares me in the face. Sometimes, it is sneering. NO, make that often. I don't mind. Not so much, that I have gotten used to it. Surprises no longer surprise me.

Like the other day, I was browsing through comments on Rediff (which is the next best thing after FRIENDS to cure mild depression), and someone had written that Satyajit Ray was a traitor.

Oh why! I wondered, he is the only Indian to be awarded an Oscar, surely in a country where international success or any remote connection to it is lauded and worshipped, he ought to receive more respect than that. What treason could he have committed? I read on. Do you know why Satyajit Ray is a traitor? Because he depicted poverty in India. That abject thing that does not exist anywhere in India. He is a unpatriotic because he marketed India's poverty to the west. Won awards and recognition because that is what the west wants to see of us.

Now,take a director of the Johar ilk. Well! You know he is patriotic because he depicts true Indian values and traditions. Doesn't he make us all proud? My chest is so swollen with pride, it is going to burst any second now.

All along, I described the movies of the Johar kind (lets be kind to him as these movies predate him and call it the Bollywood masala) as shit, bullshit, horseshit, manure and crap. It has just dawned on me that they are not shit. If anything they are the exact opposite of it; the negation of shit. Kitsch, if you please.

I am reminded of Milan Kundera's definition of Kitsch in the The Unbearable Lightness of Being as “the absolute denial of shit”. Kitsch, he wrote, excludes from view everything that humans find difficult to come to terms with, offering instead a sanitised view of the world.

What the writer of that article was trying to say was that Ray's vision was against their ideal of India and therefore unacceptable. Ray, despite gaining eminence overseas is not worthy of being our hero. It has nothing to do with ciematic sensibilites or style.

Why does it surprise me or ought to? We, in India (maybe it is an universal phenemenon) are so thirsty for heroes to put up on pedestals that I expected Ray to be on one. A national hero. A role-model for filmmakers of the new generation.

Perhaps it is only fitting that he is not on one. (And perhaps... he is not on this pedestal, only to be put up on a different one)