A Trip to the Talkies

In general, the American girls studying here have been taking the grunt of culture clash in a lot more ways than the American guys. Rules of dress, modesty and decorum which are lost on most 21 year-old American girls are suddenly the strict social norms that we need to comply with. A common point of frustration among the American girls that I have talked to is that it has been hard to interact with Indian students without coming off as too forward. For this reason, the guys in our group have had a slightly higher success rate at branching out and making Indian friends.

This brings me to my discussion on Indian male friendship. Indian man-love may be the biggest cultural difference that I have observed here. Male camaraderie holds a lot of significance and breaks all of the boundaries that Americans have about male affection or emotion. It is not at all uncommon to see two male friends walking hand-in-hand or with one arm around the other. My friend Jamie, a very sociable Middlebury student, has had the good fortune to befriend several of his Indian classmates whom, he admits, “are big hand-holders.” Jamie has also been lucky enough to receive friendship text-messages from his new friends. These, popular and un-ironic messages are usually puns or riddles expressing the value of a good friend.

Very jealous of the attention, a few girls and I tagged along with Jamie and two of his Indian friends to go see a Telugu movie last night. Abas and the other boy whose name escapes me were really enthusiastic about bringing us to this movie. “You’ve seen Hindi Bollywood movies, but you have to see a local Telugu film!” They kept saying. It’s true. We’ve been out as a group to see two great Bollywood movies, Ghajini, an action film starring the popular Aamir Khan and his six-pack abs, and Rab ne Bana di Jodi, a real musical extravaganza, but these are both creations of Mumbai, and we had yet to experience film from this region. (For reference “Bollywood” refers to Hindi-language films made mostly in Mumbai, here in Hyderabad, the major dialect is Telugu, not Hindi, so there is a different film culture.) Our wonderful hosts for the evening were especially excited about this particular film, which they described as a “black-buster superhit.” It was also especially unique because, as they kept emphasizing, “it has a female protagonist.” Arundhati, the cinematic masterpiece in question, is a gory horror film involving a ghost seeking revenge on a screaming girl. It's hard to say exactly what the plot was, due only in part to the fact that I don't speak Telugu. There were none of the fabulous music and dance numbers seen in Bollywood cinema, but Arundhati did feature a lot of "black magic," a human sacrifice by blow of coconuts, several impalings, and some really low-budget CGI. Telugu films, evidently don’t get quite as much funding as Bollywood films. The rowdy and excitable culture of the movie theater remained high though and the crowd's unbridled enthusiasm was in no way deterred by the quality of the film. If I'm going to continue going to the movies in India I'm going to have to work on my loud whistling skills.

Arundhati was certainly a memorable experience, but I personally felt the highlight of the evening was the true exposure to Indian culture that our hosts provided us with, namely, in the form of transportation. Here we thought we had mastered the art of rickshaw riding, but last night we learned how it is REALLY done. The seven of us waited by the street for a rickshaw to take us to the movie theater. Soon enough a rickshaw with two drivers pulled over—this is not uncommon and I have yet to figure out why, I think it’s really just a companionship thing, but many drivers seem to work in pairs. In any case, a rickshaw is just barely big enough to tightly fit three butts in back and maybe two in front if you have doubles-drivers so naturally; we assumed we would be taking at least two rickshaws. Not so apparently. True to local culture, we really stretched the limits of crowding capacity. Each of us exercising our contortion skills and stretching our concepts of personal space, we somehow managed to get FIVE people in the back of the vehicle and FOUR people (two passengers, two drivers) into the front. Let that be a record: NINE people in a rickshaw.