The Great Indian Hope Trick

Kaveree Bamzai

Don’t touch the bottle with your mouth, Richard from Texas tells Liz from Connecticut and New York in the Indian part of herEat Pray Lovejourney. It was her favourite part of the expedition, Liz Gilbert told me from New Jersey where she now lives with her Brazilian husband. But it’s a swarm of cliches onscreen. There are elephants to be patted. Cows to be avoided. Seventeen-year-old girls speaking in sing-song accents, who are married against their wishes. And mosquitoes who make authentic-looking red welts on Julia Roberts’ $20-million skin. But then what do you expect from the West when the best we can do at the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games is to recycle traditional dances, the chaos of the bazaar and folk rhythms? And look forward to obscure martial arts dances and five forms of music in the closing ceremony? At the Beijing Olympics 2008 opening ceremony, tradition was mixed with ingenuity, whether it was showcasing Chinese opera or space exploration, with a giant model of the earth morphing into a Chinese lantern. We used technology too, but only in a sterile way. All right, so it’s difficult to portray modern India, with its IT and industrial growth, its cricketing triumphs and its Bollywood glamour. But surely the combined creative genius of Javed Akhtar, Shyam Benegal and Prasoon Joshi could have come up with more original thinking?