Holy Shit

UTTAR PRADESH



Varanasi


The holliest city in India, by the holly Ganges river. Hundreds of pilgrims come everyday to cremate their lost ones. The purpose of being cremated here being to free oneself from the reincarnation cycle.

The city is a mayhem thanks to a rather bad handling of waste disposal and such. The sewage goes straight into the Ganges, where pilgrims bath. This is the holliest city in India, near Krishna's birthplace (Vindhravan), and they don't hesitate to throw the corpses straight into the river, letting the body float towards its delivrance. A special treatment for the higher castes they say, but outside of Varanasi this is regarded as source of pollution of the water. If it was just for that... Corpses of cows and dogs, garbage, sewage flowing in. The water is actually so polluted and full of bacterias that nothing could hope to survive in it. And they bath happily. They rub themselves with the water. Brush their teeths. Take generous gulps of water to wash their mouths before spitting it out in thin streams of holliness. Blessed, happy.

The place is a contradiction in itself.

Small streets vomiting garbage in all corners. Smell of piss, shit and burning corpses. An old Indian man is crouching by a huge cow dropping. He dips both of his hands in it. I quickly look away, slighlty disgusted, as he plays with it for minutes. I'm later explained that they use small balls of cow droppings for a better combustion.

I can't help but thinking what would happen if I took a poop in the middle of the Vatican. The huge gap between our treatment of (very) holy places and theirs is so wide that it is ununderstandable. What is their notion of respect of religion and the city? They seem to not respect their environment and public places like we do, which makes me wonder. We do take off our shoes before stepping into a temple or someone's house here. The notion seem almost inverted, where what is holy does not need to actually be "clean" because it is clean by essence.





My bad experience of the place is surely related by this:
The first day I arrived in Varanasi I fell ill, after a 14 hours train ride sleeping on the floor because of no beds available. Arriving in the city, bad tummy ache, feeling nauseaus. The migraine became worse thanks to the state of the city and rubbish everywhere (see above), then heavy sweating and feeling exhausted. I became worried when I started having difficulties to breath after the smallest efforts (Standing up and walking for a few metres), and I decided to pay a visit to the hospital. Thirty odd Indians are standing there in line, obviously impatient, waiting to retrieve an admission ticket. As a foreigner, western, I get a special treatment and, as I try to go at the back of the queue, a police officer stops me. He escorts me through the back door straight to the office on the other side of the window to get my ticket straight away for a Rs10 note. An Indian is asked to stand off his chair by a table where doctors are seeing patients to have me seated. Moments later I'm with one of the doctors, to whom I tell about my condition. Nice and quick, enjoyable to be treated in such a way after having walked 3 kilometres to get to the hospital. I'm sweating a lot, feeling very tired and my mouth so dry that I find it even hard to talk. I describe the symptoms to the man. 1 tablet of antibiotiques and a couple of "Electral", minerals to mix with lemon juice, water and salt. The whole hospital visit and purchasing the medicine have taken just over 10 minutes. A pill and I'm feeling better after a few minutes - Sweet placebo effect. I rush to the travel agency office to book my train to Kolkata. 16:25 train. Perfect.

Booze

My second day in Ahmedabad and it's raining heavily. Everyone is happy about it, and their preparing street celebrations to show it, women are covering their hands with henna and wearing their best sarees.

As for me, I'm gate crashing a Western party to enjoy fully my right (as a tourist and western) to purchase booze with a freely obtained license. Gujarat is a dry state, one of the only states in India where alcohol is prohibited, except if you purchase a costly license in which case you're allowed limited amounts every week. Most Gujaratis I've spoke to are in favor of this law, and they explain that allowing alcohol would see an increase in crime rates and general feel of insecurity, especially for women. At first I find these views a tad conservative and exagerated, but I get to understand that responsible drinking is far from widespread around here, and in India in general, and most Gujaratis just can't handle their acohol and would drink till they become out of their minds, becoming dangerous hazards to others.

Bollywood

About Bollywood. Back in France, non-afficionados don't know much about Indian movies. Any movie coming from India that is not a film d'auteur (Satyajit Ray's movies, very well known amongst film enthusiasts, as well as Guru Dutt, Bimal Roy or Ritwik Ghatak, known for the revolutionary movies they made throughout the 60's and 70's) will be looked upon as a show of grandeur and beautiful colours, ridiculously over-the-top acting and an overall farce with no deep meaning. Therefore most people will watch a Bollywood for the music, dancing, or a good laugh. I started taking interest in Indian Cinema a couple of years back, and it started filling my mind with questions as to why Indian popular movies are the way they are, and what real issues should one read in them. The main questions I was asking myself (and one that I generally ask a lot about all sorts of topics) being: Why?

Why the luxury, the shine, the grandeur and the exagerated acting? Why are emotions stretch to the extreme (see Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Devdas), why do we constantly switch from one genre to another within the same film, from drama to comedy to action and so on? And by the way, why is the film three hours long??

After watching a lot of films, from various periods of the Indian Cinema History (Ranging from the golden age of the 50's and Mehboob Khan's films, to the social cinema of the 70's to the melodramatic cheesiness of the 80's till the great new actors of the 90's (the Khans) and today's films), and trying to have an insight by reading theories on Indian Cinema and various essays, reviews and articles, I found a little explanation of my own. The Indian audiences need their films to be the more detached to their everyday life as possible (I'm talking about the general public here ; I'm pretty confident that the Bachchan-Rai wedding did look something like a wedding scene from a Karan Johar's movie), so they can escape from their everyday reality. I know that the majority of the Indian population live with little earning and in unhealthy and poor conditions. The Big Bollywood Factory therefore offers to everyone's access a good three-hours long portion of dream, with so many twists, turns, and changes of mood that the audience can completely escape the everyday through entertainment. Then the dream is carried on to the streets through music. People who sang to me often half-close their eyes or raise them to the sky.

Arriving in Mumbai, I understood this need to escape reality. After only two days I was already fed up with the pollution, constant city noise and the impressive and massive over-population. I had prepared for it through tons of reading but living the actual thing is a very different experience altogether. It made me understand it fully.

I wish to take note here that, even though the Bollywood Industry is known to be the biggest in the world with some 800 movies released each year, this figure doesn't have a real meaning here. The Indian audience proves to be very discerning when it comes to movies, and only a dozen movies will actually make profit, while the news of a bad movie will be spread so rapidly by sharp Indian criticism and efficient word of mouth that it just won't cover for its cost. For instance the latest Akshay Kumar / Kareena Kapoor movie, Kambakkht Ishq, will probably not make up for its Rs70 crores of production costs (Rs1 crore = 10 million Rupees) simply because it's a disaster and people know it! Despite grossing an impressive Rs19 crores during the opening week, thanks to high expectations and hopes that Akki would be back in shape after his few horrendous last movies (Chandni Chowk To China......), the expectations were simply not met and the theatres were empty the following week! 5 persons shared the cinema with me when I went to see the movie at that time. I wont review the movie here, I'm merely trying to give an exemple of how good judges the Indian audience is about its movies.

In my quest for Bollywood, I went to "Film City", in the Goregaon district, to try and meet some of the people who make it happen, actors, directors, technicians, and hopefully to watch a shooting. Bollywood wasn't there unfortunately, and I ended up having to clap my hands for a boring dance competition program for the telly. Going back downtown in the evening, I met an American girl who had just been approached by a guy looking for extras to act in a movie. Luckily she's not so interested and hand over the card to me. It reads: "Amjad Khan, Bollystar, specialized in Western people". Perfect. I give this Amjad a ring the next morning and he asks me to come the next day for a night shooting. 5pm to 5am. The movie is for television, "Un Hazaro Ke Nam" (roughly translated by "In the name of thousands") by Siddhart Sen Gupta, and is ploted around the November 2008 Mumbai attacks. I can be seen during the wedding scene holding a cocktail glass and chatting up some other extra. The next scene, I'm running back and forth in the crowd after a bomb has exploded. I got paid Rs500 for the night and it was a lot of fun.