ROCK ON!
The winners write the history books, and the majority watched the movies...
The country is on the boil these days thanks to the Orissa situation, and that leads me to wonder what the impression of the general Indian is of Catholics, or perhaps Christians in general.
I recently went to watch the much-raved about Rock On! It was a good movie, from a Bollywood point of view. The movie was much better than the usual drivel one sees, though it did have the necessary 'heart-tugging' elements, love, nostalgia and a brain tumour.. The movie is a major hit with everyone recommending it to everyone else and more and more people watching it. Which is a problem. Because Joe Mascarenhas, the character played by Arjun Rampal, is worrying.
Joe Mascharenhas is a man who does pretty much nothing. A loud, talented man, with the gift of music, and nothing else. He allows his wife to walk all over him, does nothing to support her or his wife, and in all-in-all a waster, albeit a sexy waster. The most doggone thing about it is a majority of the audience actually sympathized with him...
All the other band members had steady lives, steady jobs...Joe ran a 'music shop' where the only customer seemed to be his son.
And that lead me thinking, is it any wonder then that almost everyone I know seems to think that Christians are worthless hen-pecked drunks who are unable to support their families... Or people with loose morals... Or people who like to have 'a good time' which is either forbidden or not done in any other religion.
Where is the hope for secularity where people laud movies that deal with 'different' subjects like homosexuality, (but the homosexual is always christian) or unwed pregnancies (where the pregnant girl is a christian) or AIDS (where the victim is a Christan homosexual--two birds with one stone, I'm guessing)?
Do Hindu's never get drunk, pregnant or Gay? Do Hindu's not lie, cheat or steal? Do no Hindu's eat meat? And do all Muslims hate India? Do all Muslims eat semi-raw meat and sit on straw mats and plot ways to kill a majority of the country? Can a Christian not be the regular, non-pregnant, non-lesbian heroine of a movie? Or the Muslim an India-loving Hero?
We talk of change and tolerance... Yet we love Joe Mascarenhas and hate his hard-working wife, who we call a nag because she wants her husband to get off his butt and work, and do soemthing for her family.
Well, India, Rock On!
The country is on the boil these days thanks to the Orissa situation, and that leads me to wonder what the impression of the general Indian is of Catholics, or perhaps Christians in general.
I recently went to watch the much-raved about Rock On! It was a good movie, from a Bollywood point of view. The movie was much better than the usual drivel one sees, though it did have the necessary 'heart-tugging' elements, love, nostalgia and a brain tumour.. The movie is a major hit with everyone recommending it to everyone else and more and more people watching it. Which is a problem. Because Joe Mascarenhas, the character played by Arjun Rampal, is worrying.
Joe Mascharenhas is a man who does pretty much nothing. A loud, talented man, with the gift of music, and nothing else. He allows his wife to walk all over him, does nothing to support her or his wife, and in all-in-all a waster, albeit a sexy waster. The most doggone thing about it is a majority of the audience actually sympathized with him...
All the other band members had steady lives, steady jobs...Joe ran a 'music shop' where the only customer seemed to be his son.
And that lead me thinking, is it any wonder then that almost everyone I know seems to think that Christians are worthless hen-pecked drunks who are unable to support their families... Or people with loose morals... Or people who like to have 'a good time' which is either forbidden or not done in any other religion.
Where is the hope for secularity where people laud movies that deal with 'different' subjects like homosexuality, (but the homosexual is always christian) or unwed pregnancies (where the pregnant girl is a christian) or AIDS (where the victim is a Christan homosexual--two birds with one stone, I'm guessing)?
Do Hindu's never get drunk, pregnant or Gay? Do Hindu's not lie, cheat or steal? Do no Hindu's eat meat? And do all Muslims hate India? Do all Muslims eat semi-raw meat and sit on straw mats and plot ways to kill a majority of the country? Can a Christian not be the regular, non-pregnant, non-lesbian heroine of a movie? Or the Muslim an India-loving Hero?
We talk of change and tolerance... Yet we love Joe Mascarenhas and hate his hard-working wife, who we call a nag because she wants her husband to get off his butt and work, and do soemthing for her family.
Well, India, Rock On!
posted by Ruth at 3:58 PM
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