Shame in Delhi, Salaam India in Toronto

Life, alas, can sometimes be Janus-headed. Actually, make that two-faced. Here I was at the 35th Toronto International Film
Festival (TIFF), basking in the positive buzz of  four Indian films being premiered at a festival known as an international launch pad for many cineastes. It wasn’t just the robust ovations at the end of the screenings. Kiran Rao’s Dhobhi Ghat, Sidharth Srinivasan’s Pairon Tale, Aamir Bashir’s Hadud, and Anurag Kashyap’s The Girl in Yellow Boots went down more than well with the audience.

It was the red carpet status of our stars that drew huge crowds.

The queue — composed of Canadian desis and a heavy sprinkling of goras — for Dhobhi Ghat at the elegant Elgin Theatre, seemed to go round the block, into infinity. They were the lucky ones with tickets, some bought in black. The unlucky ones in the swelling crowd across the road were waiting hours for a glimpse of Aamir Khan.

Interestingly, some of them were goras, like Rita, a housewife just this side of middle age. She happened to walk into a theatre showing 3 Idiots last year, was instantly smitten with Aamir and returned to see the film three times.

It felt good to be an Indian witnessing the enthusiastic response to our films, two of them by young, debutants: some smart journalist christened the new Indian cisnema “Hindie” — a witty combination of Hindi and indie.

But that good feeling vanished soon after my return to Delhi. The coming Commonwealth Games appeared to be heading towards a national disaster, and a national embarrassment.

A new steel drawbridge at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium’s car park collapsed, some of the new residential towers for the athletes are filthy, top international athletes are pulling out — the list of mishaps just keeps growing.

As do the tales of sheer incompetence and colossal corruption. Ironically, while the image of India Shining is being given quite a battering — both here and in the international press- — the Sensex is on an upward swing. An enduring cliché about India is that it is a land of incredible juxtapositions and contradictions — both the boom and the doom. Most of our “Hindie” filmmakers showcased at TIFF have explored the aspirations and lives of those left out of the India hurtling towards modernity and prosperity. The underdog, the underbelly of a city, the dark side of man, class divides, those living lives of quiet desperation, come into focus in some of their films.

But what makes these films different from those churned out by Bollywood, films which  explore the same terrain, is the lack of heavy didacticism and melodrama. There is more
experimentation with narrative structures. 

There is a new, contemporary voice at work here, and with it a new sensibility, aesthetics and a slickness that is not of the smart-ass kind. For instance, in the impressive Dhobhi Ghat, Kiran Rao makes us hear both the throbbing heartbeat of this city by the sea that never sleeps (she has described her film as an ode to Mumbai) and the murmur of a broken heart of a woman on the verge of… Well, I can’t disclose the ending. 

As in Peepli Live, the dialogue in most of the Indian films screened at TIFF is natural, almost as if it has been improvised.

The ordinary man is in focus, without being stereotyped.

While the Canadians are coming down hard on the preparations for the Commonwealth Games, in Toronto at least, it was Salaam India.