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The
Indian Oscars!
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The
81st Academy Awards will probably go down in the
pages of history as the most memorable one. The
much-celebrated underdog phenomenon swept the
awards clean bringing 3 awards to India. While
Slumdog scored eight on ten awards it was nominated
for, Brand India grabbed all the eyeballs that
were glued to the television sets.
Slumdog’s
unrelenting record run (outside the Indian sub-continent
and in the rest of the world, of course) continued
with trade analysts predicting that the movie
will amass millions in dollars. While the Indians
are divided in opinion over the movie the entire
world seemed to have gobbled up the rags-to-riches
fairy tale from a third-world (or should I say
developing?) country.
And boy, it was India all the way at the Oscars
this year. What we thought was unachievable, Oscars,
the inappropriate benchmark that we set ourselves
for Indian movies, had finally arrived home -
and three of them in one catch. 43-year old Rahman
equaled the total number of
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Oscars India won during the past 80 years by bagging
two of them. (The other two were Bhanu Athaiya, the
first Indian to win an Oscar, for Gandhi in 1982 and
director Satyajit Ray, who received a lifetime achievement
award in 1992.). Pookutty’s Oscar for sound mixing
added to the count.
But the surprise came from the ‘best documentary’
awards section. With India having been blinded by the
Slumdog bandwagon, it’s not surprising that nobody
noticed the winning potential of the documentary ‘Smile
Pinki’, filmed in India about a little girl who
was bullied by the society (that comprises of her world
- her school mates and other kids) for having born with
a cleft lip, a congenital birth defect.
Smile
Pinki follows the life of a six-year-old Pinki who lives
in the Dabai village of Uttar Pradesh. Magan Mylan,
the American director’s 39-minute documentary’s
winning streak means a lot to the Smile Train project
and the plastic surgeons involved in it. The project
was launched to create awareness about cleft lip and
palate and that it is rectifiable by surgery. Thanks
to the project, Pinki went through a surgery and earned
her right to smile - as lovely as any other child.
And she walked the red carpet too
– in her pig tails, pink glossy clothes and
a confident, reborn smile. Now, how many of us noticed
that!
Smile Pinki might neither be released
at your nearest theatre nor might it be available
for downloads on torrent share. But it has managed
to create awareness among the poor villagers who,
by far, thought that their children can live with
cleft lips and palates shunning social ostracism.
And now for the clichés –
Beauty pageant wins, chess championships, dirt cheap
BPO services, Information Technology services, the
disputable status of Asian superpower and now Oscars
too. It wouldn’t kill to say that India has
come a long way. Jai Ho!
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