Of Excerpts and Ideologies

Excerpts from an Article by Jaideep Sahni, scriptwriter, "Chak De India" on India @ 60, taken from Rediff.com .
Full interview @ http://specials.rediff.com/india60/2007/sep/20slide.htm

'India C is not invited to the party'

In terms of India today, Jaideep is quick to make demarcations. "The way I see it there's an India A, India B and India C. India A is us, sitting here right now. We've come from pretty privileged backgrounds, as normal Indians go. We are the top 1% in terms of resources. We call ourselves upper middle-class, but are actually extremely high class as far as percentages go in India.

"India B is the India of Bunty Aur Babli, who sees us on cable and wants to be like that. Then there's India C, the tribals we used to watch dancing with Indira Gandhi when we were kids. You ask them who the prime minister is, they'll say Mahatma Gandhi. They are completely untouched by all this. So the market economy has touched India A, has touched India B, is on the rise in towns like Kanpur, etc. And India C is not invited to the party.

"They're the ones who are committing suicide," sighs the writer. "So this trickle-down, as they say, is happening. I'm aware it's happening. Whether it's happening fast enough, or in an equitable enough way, I don't think so. We don't make movies for them, we don't make any product for them. We don't even do government for them, some Naxalites are their government. There's a vacuum there, no?

"So they make their own movies. Bhojpuri movies are doing well, na? They have their own system of judiciary. The trickle-down is happening, opening up to the world is helping us and I'm all for it but there's an India which is shining, there's an India which is waiting to shine, and hungry for opportunities, which is Bunty Aur Babli, and there's an India which has no hopes in hell of ever shining, and we aren't even looking at them. That's not fair."

'We are basically decent people'

On the present generation's apathy towards all things rural, Jaideep is more hopeful than most. He considers us decent, unaware people too caught up in an economic boom to look at the rest of us. "We want to succeed and there are opportunities for us to succeed after a long time. We want to make the best of everything, and now. Which is great, I love it. Because we're in a hurry we don't have much time to look at India B or India C. But I'm confident that if our attention is drawn to it, we will. Because we are basically decent people."

"I think we can be more equitable," he says when asked to comment on the current Indian government, "which, in theory, the government seems to be preaching. I just don't know how much it is practising it. Perhaps it is. I love Dr Kalam's idea of urban infrastructure in rural areas. I love the work that micro-credit people are doing. I love the fact that the rural economy is growing in many areas."

"But I don't love the fact that most people are not aware of an experiment we had implemented, which I'd read in the Harvard Business Review 10 years back," he smiles at yet-another invaluable decade-old memory, digressing to grin and add the thought that's there's a movie in the story. "They went and put one telephone in a village in Karnataka. Just one telephone. Before the PCO boom started. They went after three years. The per-capita income of the village had gone up, multiple times. The middlemen were out of the vegetable market. The bank balances of an average villager had gone up many times. Some people from the village had gone abroad for the first time in their lives."

"Just access, and a telephone. What does it take? It takes us nothing to do it. The cable revolution and the telecom revolution have given this country the biggest fillip than what all of us imagine we have done. They are much bigger stories than all of us, and what any of us do."

'We need equality of opportunity'

I just feel that the government's got its theory right, but we're in a time of coalition governments, and coalition governments, by their very nature, don't allow many theories to be converted to practice, because there are too many conflicting agendas. As a computer engineer myself, I'm willing to celebrate a Wipro. I love a Wipro, an Infosys. I love all of it," he says in a relentless rush, finally pausing to collect himself.

"But I believe that if you put the same operating system in Hindi and put it in a village, there will be an equality of opportunity and they'll be as good as anybody else."

-- Berhael