Ruining a Perfectly Good Piece of Mindless Entertainment Via Feminist Criticism Is Kind of My Thing

Here's the most important thing to know about the movie Krrish, ie the Indian Superman; Catie and I watched it, in Hindi, with no subtitles, and knew exactly what was going on the entire time. Actually, the scenes with a little bit of English--like the villian claiming, "I will become God!"--were the most confusing, because it meant I had to focus on the dialogue. Most of the time, I could ignore the speaking altogether.

Catie and I had a day to kill in Delhi before she headed back to the US of A, and before I took the night train to Jodphur, Rajasthan, where I write currently. So we trucked over to Connaught Place, luggage in hand, to the Regal Theatre, to catch the movie that has done several times better than Superman. A plot summary seems sort of superfluous, but here goes: Krisna is a boy genius and wonder athlete who has to rescue his woman a bunch of times on the way to eventually rescuing his long-lost father. At some point, he adopts a secret identity (Krrish) for no particular reason. Also, there are some great song and dance numbers, though far fewer than the one-song-every-seven-minutes Bollywood average.

This was only my second Bollywood experience, but it's pretty clear from what I've seen and read how these things work--lots of splash and romance, shady use of gender, and ready-to-use archetypical characters (the loving mother, the helpless girlfriend, the questing main man) and nonsense plot. In May You Be the Mother of 100 Sons, Bumiller quotes an Indian film critic saying that the difference between Bollywood movies and Hollywood movies is that "Hollywood movies make sense."

It was really fun listening to the sparse audience respond to the film. The biggests outbursts occurred when:
1. A chimpanzee threw a bananna at a woman's butt.
2. The lead woman trips and falls into Krishna's bulging arms for the first time.

Caite and I came in looking to laugh and enoy the absurdity of Bollywood at its best, and we did--shots of a wild stallion galloping across a Himalayan pasture under a horizon to horizon raindow were too much for our cynicized eyes.

One neat thing about Bollywood films (well, Krrish anyway) is that the films make so little sens in terms of the sequence of events that you get to watch a different kind of logic unfold, free from the fetters of plot. A great example in Krrish: the leading couple is walking in a waterpark (for no reason except that this way you can show lots of white women and Singaporean women walking around in bikinis) when, at the top of a tower (?) the woman somehow slips and begins to fall backwards. Luckily, Krishna catches her hand, who continues saying romantic things to her in his sweet and playful voice as the woman, Priya, hangs, caught between a man and death. only his strength and wisdom can save her. And the only thing that keeps people from saying, "wait, why are they at the top of the tower again? and what does this have to do with anything?" is that this kind of logic is what drives Bollywood movies. This movie uses archtypes as placeholders which the audience can latch onto in lieu of any actualy sense.

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I walked around a couple of big tourist plots with Catie this last week, in Amritsar (the seat of Sikhdom, and home of the Golden Temple) and Mcleod Gunj (the residence of the Dalai Lama in exile.) Neither of us have een come close to being physically assaulted or robbed in India--I haven't heard of anyone who has, actually--but Catie said she was glad to have a male person to wander with.

Let me be clear; Catie is no wimp. But having me around helped filter our some of the men who lik to stare at white women on trains, or offer thier phone numbers after 15 seconds of conversation. Often at touristy spots, Indian tourists like to have their photo taken with white people. That's ok, if a bit awkward--but when it's a group of young men taking their photo with an American woman, things are decidedly weird. First, touching Indian women is distinctly taboo, so you get the feeling that these guys think they're getting away with something when they put their arm around an white woman. Second, as an Indina fellow named Anil, who runs tours in Mcleod Gunj, told us, often young men will tel their buddies that they slpet with the woman in the photo, a cliam made credible by the physical proximity of the two in the shot. The whole ritual has an air of fully clothed, cadid pornography.

We ran into some women travelers who told us stories of their run-ins with bad-news Indian men. Two British ladies, Katie and Lauren, told us about a drive-by-groping in Delhi. Eliza from the States told us my favorite story.

She had just checked into a hotel in Mumbai, and was checking her e-mail, when a well-dressed middle aged man sat down and strikes up a conversation. Turns out, he owns the hotel, and a handful of other businesses in town. Somehow (she's not sure how) he lured her next door to one of this jewlerly places, where he gifted her with an $800 gold and diamond necklace.

"He kept saying really nice things about how I look, how kind I am," Eliza told us. "Eventually, his limo pulls up, and he asks if I want a tour of the city. I'm thinknig, 'oh god, I'm going to be kidnapped and sold into slavery,' but I didn't know hot to get out of it, beause I felt obligated because of the earrings."
"You took the earrings?" we all asked, astonsiehd.
"Yeah. So then we're driving around Mumbai, and he's giving me a tour--"
"You got into the limo?" we cried out.

I can hardly believe how stupid that was--but on another level, most travellers at one time or another accept the hospitality of a stranger in part because we'd like to not give offence.

Eliza's day continued with a meal at a 5-star restauraunt, and several thousand dollars worth of designer clothes.

"He gave me an Armani dress," she laments. We can't believe she accepted all the stuff, but she says that she couldn't help it--he was being to earnest and uncompromsiign in his offerings. Finally, Eliza played sick and managed to get back to her hotel room alone, where she promptly called her mom.

"First of all, Eliza, you're a fucking idiot," mom said in Castilliano. Eliza agreed to leave all of the gifts in the room and check out immediately. It was 5AM in the nearby McDonalds until friends from the suburbs came to pick her up.

"I just didn't want to feel like I owed him anything in any say," she says, explaining her traumatic parting with the beautiful things.

(Later, she tells us that she kept the earrings to give to her mom. "Won't she be mad that you kept them?" we asked. "I'll just say I got a really good deal," she replies. I'll say.)

Part of this stry is the tale of a pathetic wealthy man looking for love. But it also involves the Indian fascination with white women, and the attempt to make a woman dependent on a man so she'll need him, lik Priya clinging to Krrish as she hangs above the waterpark and certain doom.

But if the choice for women is between men and death, it shoudl be recognized that death is a man too--all the troubles that women travellers (and men travellers too, for that matter) I know involve men. Travelling alone as a man makes you suceptible to getting ripped off by rickshaw drivers, but that's about it. Women face sexually-loaded threats all the time.

So I'm glad I could help fend off weird men for the week when I was travelling with Catie. For instance, when we were together, Indian men, assuming that Catie and I were married, woudl ask me if they could take her picture. This raises some red flags amidst my feminist principles, of course, but I gather that I was appreciated as a buffer zone.

The one time I actually did anything in the way of 'protection' was at the Dalai Lama's monestary. Catie and I had split up a bit, and a man asked her to be in a photo with her son. She's a sucker for kids, and agreed, but snother man decided to be in the picture as well. He scooted up next to Catie and put his arm around her.

"I said I'd be in a picture with the kid, not you," she said. When I turned around, from 30 feet away, I saw the one guy actively blocking her way. I started over that direction and called out, "Catie, uh, do you want to stay here or should we keep going, or something?" I was inarticulate, but the guys left immediately.

I'm really glad they dispersed, because I don't know what I would have done. Start a fight? Me? No, those guys didn't hightail-it because they were threatened--they left because they thought they had ventured onto some other guy's 'territory.' Not only, in the popular imagination, are women trapped between men and death (ie, men and men), but there is an elaborate set of agreements between the men wh oare doing hte resucing and those who are doing the endangering. This stuff isn't unique to India, of course, but white women are so foten turned into objects of desire that these dynamics are n display like the gender roles in Bollywood movies.

A nasty side effect of all this is that Western tourists spend a fair amount of time discussing the various ways they've been ripped off or approached. IT goes like this; people who like to take advantage of tourists tned to follow tourists, and tourists tend to be concentrated. You can see the sites in India, and meet only people who are trying to scam you. For men, I find this more or less intolerable, since for me it's an unnatural focus on the negative. I'm glad I spent a lot of time with really nice people in Kolkata so I have a permanent reminder that the vast-vast-vast majority of Indians are definitely not creeps or cheats. As travllers, we should have some perspective on where we are.

But for women it's different, and the negative stuff is so scary and represents such a different set of power relations that it's impossible to cast it aside. I'm glad that I'm a man while travelling alone in India, so I don't have to deal with all that stuff.