Today I decided to sit out for the sightseeing trip just because I felt sick yesterday. It was a good decision to make because I finally got a good night’s sleep. Getting off to such a late start, I didn’t eat lunch until 2:00 pm. Believe it or not though, that is not such an unreasonable time to eat lunch in India. The time people eat in India is delayed by a couple of hours compared to America for each meal besides breakfast. The reason they do this is because they have coffee breaks in between each meal to hold them over. I thought this subtle difference between the two countries was very interesting. Anyways, after lunch Me, Felix, and Nancy went shopping around India and I had another opportunity to take in the real Indian experience. Even at this point in the trip, the amount of people in the streets and the amount of poverty we saw was still a huge culture shock. I saw a little girl holding a baby in her arm that didn’t look like it was breathing. It was definitely one of those sights that just breaks your heart.
On the way back to our hotel, we saw a bunch of Indians surrounding a building. At first, I thought it was some sort of riot or protest, but it wasn’t, it was people rushing to get into a movie theater. Felix said the reason for the chaos was because the movies in India have limited seating. This made me wonder why movies were such a big deal in India (India has the biggest film industry in the world). I think the reason why so many Indians love going to movies is to get away from the everyday horrors that so many of them have to go through. From having to worry about how they are going to feed their families to where some of them are going to sleep at night, a movie is the perfect thing that will allow them to get away from these troubles for a couple of hours. The poor are not the only ones that benefit from movies, I think the middle to upper class also enjoy movies because of the power and status obsession that Indians have (as previously mentioned in my blogs). I think they see the actors/actresses in the movies that wear nice clothing and have nice houses and they thrive off it. Varma also proposes this as a possible reason for the popularity of Indian movies in Being Indian, when he states “[referring to Indian films] Their largely escapist fare is inclusive for its deliberate avoidance of highbrow aesthetics. Their characters speak a language the common person can understand. Their fantasies provide a few hours of relief to the ordinary Indian besieged by the problems of everyday life. And their happy endings and songs and dances provide a kind of entertainment with which all Indians identify (155)”. In America, I believe that although some people see movies to escape from everyday life, I think the majority see them for pure entertainment purposes. Whereas in India, I think the opposite is true. Also, I think part of the reason Indians are known to have so much hope and resilience can be tied to the large interest in the Indian film industry. When the poorest of the poor see a movie, I think it replenishes their hope for a better future. Once again, the littlest thing I saw here (a movie theater in this case) made me realize just how many things back home I take for granted. To me a movie theater is just a place to see a movie, to an ordinary Indian it is a place to escape reality and obtain hope for a better tomorrow.
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