The critics like it, but to urban audiences, it is an uncomfortable
reminder of ugly realities that they would rather pretend doesn't
exist:
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1873926,00.html
--------------------------------------------------snip
"The majority of viewers — the small-town moviegoer, the urban,
Hindi-speaking market — looks for star vehicles, for masala," says
Masand. "They won't care much for this one." For many Indians, the
film's subject and treatment are familiar to the point of being banal.
A lot of Indians are not keen to watch it for the same reason they
wouldn't want to go to Varanasi or Pushkar for a holiday — it's too
much reality for what should be entertainment. "We see all this every
day," says Shikha Goyal, a Mumbai-based public relations executive who
left halfway through the film. "You can't live in Mumbai without
seeing children begging at traffic lights and passing by slums on your
way to work. But I don't want to be reminded of that on a Saturday
evening." There is also a sense of injured national pride, especially
for a lot of well-heeled metro dwellers, who say the film peddles
"poverty porn" and "slum voyeurism."

"O.K., so there's filth and crime in India, but there's so much more
too," says Jaspreet Dua, a New Delhi–based business manager with an
international luxury brand. "What they've shown is not reality.
There's a lot of exaggeration and harping on well-worn clichés about
India."




-raghu.


--
Two fish are in a tank. One says to the other, "Do you know how to
drive this thing?"
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