Saturday, March 07, 2009

Slumdog Millionaire vs American Pie

Just yesterday we were having a late night discussion in office when my boss was telling us about the time she was in the Philippines & a lady (a localite) whom she met at the beach who was asking her whether we have beaches in India ..... We had a good laugh over this but we weren’t really happy about the fact that a lot of the world still thinks that India is about snake charmers sitting at every corner and tigers snatching children away from their mothers in cities & buffaloes equalling motorcyclists on the roads and a bunch of English speaking Bangaloreans who steal American jobs. Of course this is the image that we & they portray to the outside world. And to make matters worse, the multi Oscar winning media darling Slumdog Millionaire highlights the rise of a kid from well a slum to winning India's version of Who ants to be a millionaire? (The last well known 'Indian' movie was Bend it like Beckham, which did present an admittedly rather cute glimpse of the Indian diaspora). Food for thought.

And so there we were flicking between Star Movies & HBO on a Saturday night. One had Omen IV and the other a movie called Sydney White. No prizes for guessing that we went with the latter. And it was the perfect timepass movie depicting college life in America - lots of youngsters roaming around campus all day doing nothing, the different frat groups and their idiosyncrasies, parties with a lot of music and dancing & a lot more beer drinking & not to forget absolutely no studies. Ok blame it on the American Pie series (which also adds to the above formula a lot of desperate college boys)(come to think of it, they should do a TV show on that - Desperate College Guys. Why not I ask? Desperate Housewives became a global phenomenon) & a number of other similar college movies that fall under the broad category of timepass and which are good enough to forget in a few days time. All we do remember is that we Indians studying here in India certainly are missing out on a lot of fun in life. Oh wait (going by their thinking) it looks like Americans are missing out on the education part .....

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