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little protest, and no mention of the controversy over Pather
Panchali. Unlike Ray and his Apu, the director of Slumdog
Millionaire, Danny Boyle, shrewdly set his money-minded young
protagonist in ‘Modern India’, with a cast of thugs, smugglers,
murderers, perverts and degenerates sufficient to keep audiences
everywhere eagerly watching, helped along by a thumping musi-
cal score and a Bollywood-style song-and-dance finale.
Faced with such a crass and exploitative film about India, and
its numerous Bollywood equivalents, it is worth reflecting on
the views of one of the Bombay film industry’s more sensitive
figures, the Urdu poet, scriptwriter and hugely successful song-
writer Javed Akhtar, who began his film career in the early 1970s.
Delivering the Satyajit Ray memorial lecture in Calcutta in 2009,
Akhtar expressed his feeling of discouragement with modern
Indian movies: ‘In a way, they mirror the fact that we are not
ready to stop and think. Everybody is in a hurry and is looking
for instant gratification without caring for those around them.
We are making films that sell this lifestyle to a small, affluent,
multiplex-going audience that doesn’t bother about the small
town and rural population. Ray’s films depicted a compassion, a
sensitivity that is sadly missing not just from films, but from our
lives as well.’ Referring to Ray’s well-known lack of villains, even
in so bleak a film as The Middle Man/Jana Aranya about out-and-
out corruption, Akhtar remarked: ‘His characters only had nega-
tive shades. They were people trapped in their own thinking and
beliefs. While Hindi films had ferocious villains who only evoked
hatred, you actually felt sad for Ray’s negative characters. Such
was the sensitivity of the man.’ He concluded: ‘We are trying to
hide our own inadequacies that have resulted from a skewed edu-
cation system. It has not trained us to appreciate our own culture
and tradition. Vernacular education [i.e. education in Indian lan-
guages, rather than English], on the other hand, has somewhat
isolated us from the world. We need to take a long, hard look at
ourselves. Or else, we shall continue to feel incomplete and fail to
appreciate the subtlety that Ray’s films depicted.’

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