Slumdog millionaire, sucks..

Slum dog Millionaire: A movie which is Anti-Hindu and Anti-Ram

A magnificent Mumbai slum, two Muslim brothers, a Hindu mob killing innocent Muslim women, criminally amputated children singing Surdas’s songs, Hindu policemen torturing an innocent Muslim boy and a diabolic Hindu game-show host who hands his Muslim contestant to his Hindu police which hates the Amnesty international, and voila, you have all the ingredients for a ‘secular’ potboiler which is on the road to the Oscars! You might argue that it’s not realistic but only fantasy since there is greater probability of winning the jackpot on a lottery ticket without being abused by the police than winning the top prize on a quiz show with 15 unique questions.

But then you can be kidding with the graphic depiction of blood curdling anti Muslim riot in which a Hindu mob slits the children’s mother, the Indian policeman electrocuting the Muslim suspect or the gory scene of the amputation of the street children by the mafia who are then forced to sing Surdas’s bhajans. When was the last time in Indian History when an unprovoked Hindu population took to violence? For the record the Mumbai riots were incited by fanatical Muslim mobs in the face of the Baburi Masjid demolition. Moreover, it beats me how the consequent Mumbai bomb blasts triggered by local Muslim gangs be disassociated from the Mumbai riots? And the much maligned Bombay Police recently lost sixteen of its bravest men while defending the city’s freedom of speech and expression against Islamist zealots who wanted to replicate in India, a 7th century Arabia.

More disturbingly, you have the depiction of the blue bodied Rama whom Hindus consider as Maryada Puroshottam [the best among men] threatening to terminate the existence of the innocent Muslim children. Or, amputated children singing Surdas’s bhajan pining for a glimpse of Krishna? This insensitive jaundiced anti Hindu view is reminiscent of Indian leftist cinema where Hindu male characters are black and Muslims white! Remember, Mr and Mrs Iyer where a Hindu mob was searching for circumcised dicks and didn’t even spare a Jew in true Nazi fashion! Never mind that in world history, Hindus are the only people who don’t carry an atom of anti-Semitism, but the director’s flight of ‘secularist’ fancy won critical acclaim. Buddhadeb Bhattacharya in his film Uttara shows a band of Hindu goons burning a Christian church made in service of the lord’s lepers and raping an orphan girl in the process. Expectedly, this rather original gruesome way of story-telling won him the national awards! In the Tamil hit, Dasavathaaram, we find an anti-historical situation fantasizing Shaivite intolerance against Vaishnavs where Ramanujam's disciple is fighting Kulothunga Chola. Based on a solitary description of Chola antagonism in Ramanujam’s writings, we find the Chola fanatic stealing the idol of Vishnu from Srirangam, ironically the same temple complex which was plundered at least five times by Islamic armies. Previously, in the 70s when anti-Brahmana movement in Tamil Nadu was at its peak, we had Brahmana priests routinely paraded as rascals in Tamil movies

‘Islamic’ sensitivities have extracted book bans from both British and Congress governments. Girja Kumar in his “Book on Trial” has reproduced dozens of cases where Hindu books critical of Islam or the Prophet were banned, and the authors faced arrest or were killed. Salman Rushdie’s flight and Taslima Nasrin’s plight is well known. Lajja almost faced a ban because she had exposed the genocide against Hindus in Bangladesh. Movies on the state of Kashmiri pundits, victims of Islamic genocide against Hindus of Bangladeshis, the Hindu victims of the North East against Christian separatism and also the historical crimes by the armies of Islam and inquisitory Christianity are taboo in a ‘secular country’ They cannot see the light of the day because they are inimical to communal harmony and hurt minority sentiments.

This ostentatious display of anti Hindu sentiment is of course lost on the jingoists or the confused ABCDs who go gaga over such pernicious cinema. Sincere critics questioning the dumb plot where a slum boy grows up into a sophisticated leftist JNU product with a flawless English accent are censured by appealing to the authority of the Golden globe awards. They keenly forget the film was precisely designed for that, appeal to the racial sensitivities of those who really matter!