Haraam Bombay

Reality show? from Fortune.


THIS JUST IN
All the World`s a Stage
Sex? Money? Family issues? They`ve been done to death. Here`s something fresh: a play about customer service.
By Kate Bonamici


So there`s this play, Alladeen, that`s been touring all over the world for about a year. In New York City last December it sold out five shows and got a rave review in the New York Times. You might want to catch it if you get the chance. It`s about ... outsourcing.

Well, offshoring. Customer-service call centers in India, to be precise.

``As material, you almost can`t think of anything dumber, which I think is great,`` says Keith Khan, one of the drama`s co-creators.

Khan and his collaborators—Marianne Weems of the Builder`s Association, a New York theater group, and Ali Zaidi, a partner of Khan`s at Motiroti, a London arts group—actually started out to write a multimedia play using the story of Aladdin. ``He is transformed through the magic of the lamp,`` says Weems. ``That really interested us, because it`s such a deep fantasy that people still have. But we were trying to find something else to mix with that.``

Then Weems noticed an article about India`s call centers in the New York Times in March 2001 with the headline Hi, I`m in Bangalore (but I Can`t Say So). Bingo! ``That sort of opened this whole other door for us, looking at the shifting identities of workers,`` she says. The trio traveled to Bangalore, interviewed workers in call centers there, and wrote their script.

In a sense, Alladeen is just the latest in a distinguished tradition of dramas about business. There`s The Merchant of Venice. How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. The Producers. But this production is quite unlike its predecessors—for one thing, audience members are encouraged to leave their cellphones on.

I caught up with Alladeen not long ago at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. The theater in the Hopkins Center was pretty full, considering that it was Friday night at an Ivy known for its frat parties. An especially enthusiastic portion of the audience was made up of members of the college`s South Asian club (which invited the cast to its party after the show). And I am pleased to report that, Khan`s self-deprecation notwithstanding, it was not a dumb concept at all. It was superb.

The thing the Times liked so much about the production was its sense of newness. It`s a multimedia extravaganza, with a set anchored by a huge screen hanging over the stage. Lowered to the floor, the screen displays complex 3-D effects that cleverly create New York and London street scenes, complete with buses and passersby. Raised higher, it is a base for swirling visuals—computer screen shots, scenes from old Aladdin movies, fake Bollywood posters, the faces of the actual cast magnified 100 times, and a second, virtual cast of actual call-center employees filmed in Bangalore. Clubby music plays almost constantly, and a crawling ticker at the bottom of the stage streams wishes submitted to the ``World-Wide-Web Jinn`` at www.Alladeen.com.

The plot woven through all this technology is minimal—call-center workers train and take calls (some weird, some mundane); one gets fired, one does exceptionally well. There is a flirtation, quickly rebuffed, but the joy of Alladeen is in the details. The call-center operators pick American names from Friends—Aman, Savitri, Satya, and Tanya become Joey, Rachel, Monica, and Phoebe. A training course on American culture features a hysterical explanation of American football (teams wear ``representative costumes,`` and groups of players ``try to shackle this man`` who is running with the ball). The call-center workers on film tell of handling calls from perverts, of trying to eliminate ``mother-tongue influence`` in their accents, and of their bizarre new lives, working 3 a.m. to noon, during U.S. business hours. ``I want it to be a 9 to 6,`` says one, explaining the impossibility of a social life when 6 p.m. is the middle of the night. ``That`s my only wish.`` Alladeen begins with great laughs from the audience during the training sequences, but it ends wistfully, as the most successful of the operators sits alone in a London nightclub, talking on his cellphone in his new American accent.

Taking advantage of Alladeen`s visit, Dartmouth`s Tuck School of Business convened a panel discussion earlier in the week called ``Inside Outsourcing.`` Khan joined a handful of corporate executives and policy wonks to discuss the difference between outsourcing and offshoring, why call centers should be the least of people`s worries, and whether creative R&D work will eventually follow lower-level jobs to India and beyond. Said Paul Gaffney, executive vice president of supply chain at Staples: ``What`s gotten the debate raging is [people like] my friend, who runs a big division for a chip manufacturer, outsourcing his Ph.D. work. I think the picking-up-the-phone part is a very useful social context for us to understand the human issues. [But] it`s not the significant economic issue.``

Alladeen, says Weems, ``is really ultimately using the call centers as a metaphor for these larger issues about cultural masking and cultural reversals and the whole hybridity of identities.`` The audience in Hanover seemed to appreciate it—especially the Southeast Asian students behind me, who exploded in gales of laughter when one of the actors argued with his mother in Hindi. I missed those jokes, but then, it seemed to me that you could see this play several times and still not get quite everything. It`s an eclectic, multi-culti experience that leaves the average audience member feeling as if he`s taken a long trip in the course of 90 minutes. Between the settings (New York, Bangalore, London) and the creators (American, British/Trinidadian, Indian) and the cast (Indian-American, Indian-British, just plain American, etc.), I was dazzled.

You could even say I was transported.

---

Alladeen is headed to Norway, Germany, and Australia over the next few months. The production may return to New York and other U.S. cities before closing at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in May 2005. For more information, go to www.Alladeen.com.

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

re hamidm#28:

The show is actually not that bad although I wouldn`t be surprised if it doesn`t do that well with white audiences.

Here is a joke you might enjoy.

Little Johny:Come on grandpa, let`s go watch the circus.
Grandpa:Why?
Little Johny:Because the circus has a white horse and a lady does acrobatics on it wearing nothing but a pair of knickers.
Grandpa:Ok, I am game. Its been a while since I saw a white horse.

later
-sac

CRITIC`S NOTEBOOK (NYT)
From Breezy Bollywood, Films Anything but Vérité

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: April 16, 2004


In Rajiv Menon`s ``I Have Found It,`` a movie that puts a South Indian spin on Jane Austen`s ``Sense and Sensibility,`` an aspiring filmmaker named Manohar, like so many of his counterparts around the world, struggles to direct his first feature according to his own vision.

His idea — a thriller called ``Speed`` in which a fast-moving train has been rigged with a bomb — may not sound very original, but it strikes his producers, stars and technical advisers as impossibly outré, and they offer suggestions to make it more palatable to the audience. There has to be a mother, they insist, there has to be a wedding, and above all there have to be songs. ``We are making a Tamil movie,`` one of these helpful industry hacks explains, and such a project is unthinkable without those elements.

Mr. Menon`s movie, while sympathetic to Manohar`s plight, is not altogether on his side. ``I Have Found It,`` after all, features a wise, long-suffering mother, at least a half-dozen thwarted, potential and actual marriages and, most important, a handful of extravagant, show-stopping musical numbers.

In them the characters — including Manohar (Ajith), his beloved, Sowmya (Tabu, a fixture of India`s ``indie`` cinema), and her sister Meenakshi (Aishwarya Rai, one of the country`s hottest young movie stars) — lip-sync the infectious romantic songs of A. R. Rahman as they dance with gaudily costumed extras across bright fields and lush hillsides. Occasionally, for no discernible narrative reason, they dance out of India altogether, appearing at the foot of the pyramids in Egypt or in front of a stone castle in the Highlands of Scotland.

Such easy, breezy cosmopolitanism has long been a hallmark of Indian musicals. In a larger sense it is one of the main themes of the third annual ``Cinema India!`` program, for which Radha Welt Vatsal is the curator. This ambitious touring film series begins today at the Asia Society before moving to the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens and then to other cities. The community affairs department of The New York Times is a sponsor. In addition to musicals like ``I Have Found It`` and the 1995 blockbuster ``The Braveheart Will Take the Bride,`` it includes two crime melodramas; a delicate, humanist art film (which in India, according to some definitions, describes any movie without songs); and a documentary about Zakir Hussain, a prominent classical musician.

``I Have Found It,`` affectionately spoofing the conventions of Indian popular cinema (or Bollywood), also pays tribute to Bollywood`s local pervasiveness and global prestige. India`s film industry is not only the most productive in the world, turning out something like 800 feature films a year, more than triple Hollywood`s output, but also the most popular, at least by some measures. Box offices in India sell more than 12 million tickets a day, and Indian movies (and their stars) are staples of the pop-cultural diet in much of Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

The United States, ensconced in the imperial parochialism of Hollywood and spoon-fed exquisite art-house morsels from the international festival circuit, has lagged behind the rest of the world in its recognition of India`s cinematic supremacy. But the imminent Broadway opening of ``Bombay Dreams,`` an expensive stage musical with songs by Mr. Rahman, suggests we may at last be catching on.

With just six films in its program, ``Cinema India!`` is clearly not trying to be comprehensive or even representative. Given the scale and variety of movie production in India, such a thing would hardly be possible, even in a much bigger series. Instead, it offers glimpses into a parallel cinematic universe, one that is complex and sometimes puzzling but at the same time accessible and welcoming.

It is hard, for example, to resist the charms of ``The Braveheart Will Take the Bride,`` a lavish romance (with weddings, mothers and musical numbers) that few people in India have resisted since its release in 1995. ``Come, fall in love,`` was the movie`s advertising tag line, which seems to have been unusually effective. Not only was ``Braveheart`` (better known as ``D.D.L.J.,`` short for its Hindi title, ``Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge``) the top box-office attraction of that year, but it has played continuously in Mumbai ever since and has sold untold millions of videos and DVD`s, both authorized and pirated.

The film critic Anupama Chopra, in her excellent monograph on the movie (part of the British Film Institute`s Modern Classics series), estimates that the soundtrack recording can be found in one third of all Indian households.

Ms. Chopra said that ``D.D.L.J.,`` the first film written and directed by Aditya Chopra, scion of a Bollywood dynasty (and no relation to the critic), ``bent Hindi convention out of shape and gave it a modern sensibility.`` Its major innovation was bringing the experiences of nonresident Indians into the purview of Bollywood`s musical soap opera traditions. Raj and Simram are the young lovers whose long road to bliss furnishes the film`s plot. (Long at least by impatient American standards; in India a three-hour film is no big deal.) They meet in London, where their families have lived for many years.

Raj`s father is a wealthy, dandified widower who has passed some of his playboy philosophy down to his son, while Simram`s is a conservative shopkeeper who has promised his daughter to the son of his best friend back in Punjab. ``D.D.L.J.`` both acknowledges the global Indian diaspora and revels in its globe-trotting freedom. Many of the far-flung musical numbers occur while Simram, Raj and their pals are on a Eurail holiday that takes them through Paris and the Alps, where the hills are alive with the sound of Hindustani love songs.

But Mr. Chopra also suggests that Indian tradition provides a counterweight to such footloose freedom. Raj, though he stages an elaborate Molièrian ruse to disrupt Simram`s wedding, also refuses to elope with her, insisting on gaining her intransigent father`s permission. At several moments Raj asserts that in spite of growing up overseas, he is ``Hindustani through and through.``

The film`s deft combination of adventurousness and conservatism — of youthful rebellion and filial duty, which are brought into harmony at the end — may be one source of its appeal. It suggests that India, which in the 90`s was rushing headlong toward participation in the global economy after decades of semi-isolation, could embrace the wider world without sacrificing its history or its identity. Or, as the ``Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema`` rather more dogmatically puts it, the movie envisions ``an unproblematic subsumption of feudal patriarchy into `postmodern` globalization and the selling of `authentic` identity as something that can only be achieved via consumerism.``

Which is much more fun than it sounds like, since it is precisely the headlong, happy-go-lucky inauthenticity of ``D.D.L.J.`` that makes it so lovable. Mr. Chopra`s gorgeous wide-screen compositions, his cinematographer Manmohan Singh`s brilliant sense of color and the movie`s sure-footed blend of comedy and melodrama recall the great MGM Technicolor musicals of the 1950`s.

Bollywood, indeed, has kept alive the tradition of vibrant, sumptuous spectacle that Hollywood has all but abandoned. The movie musical has not so much died as migrated, taking with it the genre`s characteristic mixture of sophistication and wholesomeness. In ``D.D.L.J.,`` adhering to Bollywood norms is at once fastidiously chaste — not so much as a kiss on the mouth — and stupefyingly sensuous. It is a reminder that when sex was finally allowed into American movies, a great deal of eroticism went out.

The cosmopolitanism of modern Indian cinema also finds expression in the eager assimilation of influences from elsewhere. In ``Anything Can Happen,`` Shashanka Ghosh`s underworld melodrama, there is no wedding and the only mother figure is the matriarch of a vicious criminal gang. (There are a few songs, but they all take place within the same narrative frame as the rest of the action; at the end of one, the singer is killed by a stray bullet.) A final title card describes the film as ``a reaction to Bollywood`` and declares the director`s allegiance to such international indie folk heroes as Quentin Tarantino, Takeshi Kitano and the Coen brothers.

The results, while not always coherent, have a loopy, eclectic energy, perhaps best incarnated by the troupe of Punjabi hip-hop performers who show up now and then to drop chaos and tough-guy lyrics on the complicated proceedings. (``My business is risky/I drink Scotch Whiskey`` and ``My AK-47/ Will send you all to heaven.``)

The story veers from somber criminal sentimentality to blasé humor. The former quality is more consistently in evidence in Vishal Bharadwaj`s ``Maqbool,`` with Tabu as a scheming moll and the great Om Puri in a supporting part, which retells ``Macbeth`` in a mobbed-up Mumbai milieu and arrives at its film noir sensibility via the Japanese yakuza pictures and Taiwanese urban shoot-`em-ups of the 1970`s and 80`s.

If an unmistakably Indian version of postmodern popular culture thrives in these films, ``The Speaking Hand: Zakir Hussain and the Art of the Indian Drum,`` Sumantra Ghosal`s engrossing documentary, attests to the flourishing of an older form, the intricate and difficult classical musical traditions sustained by almost monastic discipline and passed on by venerated gurus to their young disciples.

And ``The Lady of the House,`` a quiet, subtle, almost pastoral film directed by Rituparno Ghosh, looks back at the work of Satyajit Ray and also sideways to Iran, where a cinema indebted to Ray`s socially conscious, poetic filmmaking has taken root since the late 1980`s. The film explores the inner life of an older woman whose lonely routines are disrupted — and whose emotions are awakened — by the arrival at her house of a film crew. Further evidence that in India there is just no escaping from the movies.

Bollywood on Broadway Courts South Asians
By JESSE McKINLEY

Published: April 26, 2004


When the producers of ``Bombay Dreams,`` a new $14 million musical opening on Thursday at the Broadway Theater, decided to give members of the media a sneak peek at their show late last year, they did not choose any of the usual locales. They didn`t choose a rehearsal hall or a dance studio or even a theater.

They chose a consulate.

The event, on Dec. 18 at New India House on East 64th Street, was just the first step in a concerted marketing effort to help promote the show to one of its target audiences: South Asians.

Their logic is simple: ``Bombay Dreams,`` after all, is essentially a staged version of a Bollywood film, the immensely popular kind of musical melodramas, produced in Mumbai (as Bombay is now called), that draws huge audiences from all across the Indian subcontinent. And the best estimates say that there are more than 500,000 South Asians living in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

So, since December the producers of the show, working closely with Sudhir Vaishnav, a successful Indian concert promoter, have made a determined effort to get out the word that for the first time ever on Broadway, a show speaks directly to their culture.

``Sooner or later it was bound to happen,`` said Mr. Vaishnav, who was born in Mumbai but moved to New York in 1971. ``India is an emerging power, whether it be in science or informational technology or the rise of Indian music. But that influence has never been represented on Broadway.``

It will, of course, take far more than just South Asians to carry the show and make a dent in that $14 million price tag. Even in London, where ``Bombay Dreams`` is finishing a two-year run in June and whose South Asian population is much larger than New York`s, the British producer Andrew Lloyd Webber found that he needed to tap into a traditional theatergoing crowd to keep the show running.

So in the United States producers are quick to point out that for all the Bollywood elements, the show is also a big, glitzy musical with a bundle of hummable tunes, as anyone who has heard the show`s signature song, ``Shakalaka Baby,`` can attest. Major portions of the show`s book have been rewritten by Thomas Meehan (a recent Tony winner for his work on ``The Producers`` and ``Hairspray``) to make the show more understandable for American audiences.

``We want ethnic diversity and want to honor the South Asian community, but we also feel this is a big, fun musical,`` said Elizabeth Williams, who is the show`s lead producer in America with her business partner, Anita Waxman. The producers` courting of the traditional Broadway audience is evidenced in the show`s promotional tag line: ``Somewhere you`ve never been before.``

Still, since the India House event, which was open only to journalists from the Indian or South Asian press, the producers have been diligently courting South Asians through traditional channels (like direct mail) and some less orthodox approaches.

In addition to advertising in major media outlets, producers have also placed ads on South Asian radio stations like RBC Radio and cable television programs like ``AVS`` (which stands for ``Asian Variety Show.`` They have promoted actively in South Asian enclaves like Jackson Heights, Queens, and Jersey City, putting up window cards in Indian restaurants and arranging dinner-and-a-musical deals. They`ve also reached outside the city, courting South Asian tour groups from Georgia to California.

Part of the reason for the concerted push is that for many South Asians, this is their first brush with American theater. ``For a sizable section of the community, this is serving as their introduction to Broadway,`` said Prem Panicker, a managing editor of India Abroad, a weekly English-language newspaper. ``More second-generation Indians are open to new forms of enterainment, but for the first generation, Broadway is not the norm and not really an option.``

Indeed, Mr. Panicker said that after his paper recently ran a lengthy feature on ``Bombay Dreams,`` his office was bombarded with questions from readers. ``I`d say 8 of every 10 phone calls and e-mails was from people who had never seen a Broadway play,`` he said. ``We get calls saying: `Hey, is there a dress code? Can I wear jeans? Is there an etiquette?

Subroto #25 Good to see your post. I am really sorry Greshams Law (``bad currency drives out the good``) applies on chowk. I hope some day CHOWK STAFF (this is to get their attention) will realize this, and thus start blocking posters who routinely violate ``InteAct Guidelines``.

Anyway, hope all is well with you, and that you will swing by from time to time on chowk to toss some of your great humor on chowk.

Solitude
You are making no sense whatsoever.

solitude,

...... uh?........ don`t quite understand wher you are coming from ..........i thought this was all about a musical on broadway that ms versey didn`t quite like ............ although i do believe she goes a little overboard with her socio-political analysis ............ sometimes a show is just a show ...... no?

ha ha ha...
Haram Bombay

Without really having read something here/there, I am quoting the following, as .............


`` `Bombay Dreams`: A plain old bomb

http://www.usatoday.com/life/theater/reviews/2004-04-29-bombay-dreams-review_x.htm

The plot consists of similarly cliché-ridden, pseudo-populist hooey. It involves a family of ``untouchables,`` the dregs of India`s social caste system, whose village is about to be torn down by despicable developers. Our hero, Akaash, is a slum boy who escapes by becoming a movie star. He then falls for luscious Priya, who happens to be an aspiring director.

Conveniently, Priya`s boyfriend is a creep; we know this because he wears Gucci shoes and seems glued to his cell phone. We also know Priya is virtuous, because she wants to make black-and-white films that don`t have happy endings. Besides, only she can save Akaash from the vixenish charms of screen siren Rani, who we know is evil because she wants him to reject his poor family. Worse still, she wants to wear a pink bra in Priya`s black-and-white film.

It`s tough to say whose lines are lamer: librettists Meera Syal and Thomas Meehan or lyricist Don Black, whose contributes this doozy, sung by Akaash to his fellow villagers: ``I`ll come back with china plates for you to eat on/Some Persian rugs for you to wipe your feet on/And a toilet that has a toilet seat on.``

http://peoplesforum.com/cgi-bin/forum?14@96.vdZuataYdhp.2502261@.6b699029/1861

Dear Farazana Versey,

With traitors like you India doesn`t need more Muslim (terrorists) and/or Pakistani infiltrators.

oh wait I forgot you are a Muslim already and enjoying and testing the freedom of speech and expression enjoyed by Indians.

How enviable. India will survive yet another malice.

Meanwhile I hope my fellow Pakistanis will learn the vitriol and poison spewed by Muslims (any Muslims be they Bin Ladin or Pakistani Sympathisers like Ms. Versey) is not license to support such people. If we as Pakistanis support trash we will bring infamy (further infamy) upon Pakistan. Let not people use your religion and your god and your country as an excuse to attack others.

............ has anyone seen the show in ny yet ?..............is it worth the money?............ remember, there are people like me who hated the phantom but went back to see the lion king twice ............. and no, i am not trying to emulate george bush in his disdain for elitism, stiff upper lips, carpet baggers from the northeast (no, and that is not george senior or a higher father) and tight sphincters ............ the only thing good about broadway is the big production - helicopters and lions and flea ridden cats harassing the audience ........... who wants to listen to some poor salesman harangue himself to to death on stage?.........

............ so, as long as they have some scantily clad bimbos putting on a lewd and lascivious mujra on stage, i think it is okay ......... it would be nice if the audience could lean back on gaotakiyas, chew pan and spit into an ugall dan while sipping cheap whiskey and tossing dollar bills on stage............ sigh!.......when aatish was a young man ............

From the NYT:
http://theater2.nytimes.com/2004/04/30/theater/reviews/30BOMB.html

bro subro.. i am inspired..i shall refer to some authors from now on as sweetie ;-)

With only 2 interacts this year I have mostly stopped posting on Chowk and am in the lurking mode.
I agree with Anil totally ``There should be certain decency maintained even for the differing viewpoints``. Alright I`ll admit some of the ``non-decent`` verbal interacts are quite amusing. But not when it is relentless abuse of a particular poster/writer. Every individual has the right to be critical of his/her country, so why does an Indian Muslim poster (also somone who has not immigrated) not have that right?
Decency my foot the pompous poster persistently posting putrid posts actually needs a ...................................................