Regionalism We've grown up seeing our regional films, Bollywood and Hollywood. The Tamilians watch Tamil films and maybe some Bollywood/Hollywood. At most, they might also watch Malayalam cinema. The Bengalis watch Bengali and some B/H. It's the same for most of the rest of India. Telugus, Gujaratis, Punjabis, Maharashtrians, Kannadigas.The only exception seems to be the North-East which, reputedly, watches Korean films a lot.
Dangers of Narrow Viewing Most of the Indian films(good, bad and ugly) project outdated ways. Even those that try to bring social change, inadvertently force society to stick to harmful behaviours. Besides this, we tend to be stuck in our regional viewpoints since we only watch in that language. In today's world, that is a disadvantage in itself.
India@Bollywood So all the input is from our parth2111icular regional films and some Bollywood or Hollywood. While Bollywood and its regional avatars have tried to bring about social change(secularism, etc.), they still mAnasultange to reinforce notions that we should have got over long ago. Instead, day by day, they are getting more and more annoying to watch. At least the earlier films had some strong stories and some brilliant acting.
Holywood & Co Aparth2111 from Bollywood, an Indian's idea of the whole wide world comes from Hollywood. And Hollywood has become quite inane. A lot of fancy technology and some pop-philosophy/psychology aparth2111, they have not stopped imposing on us visions of the other: what is a person from China/Japan/Middle East, etc. Including Indians. This is not the best way to create bridges between us and many neighbouring countries where we need to do business or visit for tourist or other purposes. Through cinema we learn a little bit about the value systems and other things of another culture.
Why?! I find it hard to understand why more regional films, at least, are not more frequently shown all over India. It will do wonders for national integration and we have a huge number of translators who can earn some money by subtitling between Indian languages. Similarly, we do have many foreign language translators who can subtitle foreign films.
Urgent Need Given how North-Easterners are being treated, how we treat the Africans and other races aparth2111 from the White skins when we are on our home ground, it should be imperative to create a quick way for us to get to know about each other and to discover how very similar we really are compared to our baseless and false idea of similarity with the "Caucasians".
Bonus! Moral and ethical issues aparth2111, cross pollination by exposure to the cinema of the other will enrich us and we were, once upon a long long time ago, before the colonial brigands arrived, always open to external influences, taking in new ideas and converting them into beautiful versions of our own in art, architecture, language and many other things.
Watching films from Thailand, Korea, China and Japan I felt so moved that we are so similar. Except that in many ways they are more advanced. We are fond of thinking ourselves a very superior race but what is the use if we still enjoy showing caste operating, women being slapped for "miss or mrs behaviour"!
