The creative drought has not been as bad as your cover story Flop Show (November 25) leads us to believe. Using just box-office performance as a criterion, you have shortchanged some of the good work Bombay cinema has done this season. Over the last 18 months, there have been films that are truly different from the tripe fed routinely. Agnivarsha, Raaz, Sur, Aankhen, Road are just some of the movies which have paved the way for more offbeat mainstream cinema. I, for one, welcome the trend.
Gaurav Sarup, Chicago, US
Bollywood seems to be running out of ideas. Most of the films are either southern remakes or inspired by Bollywood.
R.C. Parsa, on e-mail
As a writer for films, I can tell you the industry is completely anarchic and disorganised. Producers don’t pay dues and directors don’t support writers. Deadlines mean nothing to them and paycheques are promises seldom realised. Besides, they have hundreds of ways to steal your credit. No wonder we writers have little incentive to write creative scripts and the result is cover stories like yours.
Ishan Trivedi, Mumbai
Good article. All Bollywood needs to do is stare into the mirror of Bollywood Calling!
Manish Gupta, Ann Arbor, US
Why do the flops surprise anyone when mediocrity rules in Bollywood? The audience gets the films it truly deserves. After all, if the lost twin theme or revenge dramas hadn’t become such huge hits, we surely wouldn’t have had to suffer their remakes today. Originality is passe. Everyone wants to make a fast buck, creativity be damned.
Dr Orson Sequeira, on e-mail
Forget the ideas, our filmmakers have stopped bothering to think about even original film titles, relying on old film songs to do the trick.
Rajul Garg, Bangalore
What’s surprising is that despite so many flop films and losses of Rs 290 crore on an investment of about Rs 1,000 crore, no one ever has filed for bankruptcy. I guess all that underworld funding comes in handy. Mr Kelkar should perhaps have directed some energy towards the film industry rather than just the salaried and the middle class!
Suja Nambiar, Karaikal
The flop shows apart, Bollywood will survive. Big will always be beautiful and there can be no substitute.
Mahesh Kapasi, on e-mail
The judging of judges (Judgement Day, November 25) should be part of a much wider reform in the judiciary towards the simplification of procedures, transparency and the speeding of judgements. The illustration of the judge as a holy cow is apt. So far, no institution has dared to question the integrity of the judiciary. But the fact is judges too are a product of the same society and function in the same socio-political system that we are part of; hence they are like us in all respects, including corruption. The need of the hour is a proper vigilance mechanism to receive, process and dispose of complaints against judges. Or else, the judiciary too will degenerate into an ineffective and unreliable system.
N. Saraswati, Secunderabad
To my mind, when ex-chief justice S.P. Bharucha claimed that up to 20 per cent of the judges in the upper level of India’s judiciary could be corrupt, it was reason to be alarmed. The judiciary, like all other institutions, should also be accountable to the people. As a first step, there should be a relaxation of contempt laws and freedom of speech should be supreme. The present state of law, where even truth is not valid defence in a contempt of court proceeding, militates against the very sense of justice.
Aniruddha Vaidya, California, US
The post-Jhajjar conversions are a slap in the face of chief ministers like Jayalalitha and other pro-Hindutva forces who believe that all conversions are by force or allurement (Choosing Their Religion, November 18). In Maslow’s theory of the hierarchy of needs, ‘self-esteem’ is an important need that guides human behaviour, like hunger, thirst and sex. People like Cassius Clay nee Mohammad Ali, Supreme Court lawyer K.L. Gauba, Dr B.R. Ambedkar and writer Kamala Das were never converted by force.
M. Akhtar, Bhubaneshwar
I live in a state once described by Swami Vivekananda as a "madhouse of caste" due to the extreme caste inequalities there. But the changes in society since the temple entry proclamation of 1936 have been nothing short of revolutionary. Now when Dalits in Haryana are deserting Hinduism, in Kerala, a lower-caste lady known as Mata Amrithanandamayi has become the most revered Hindu icon of the state and has upper castes touching her feet in thousands every day. A contradiction it may be, but that’s what this amazing religion is all about. No wonder, it’s weathered every storm and thrives on even after 3,000 years!
Samuel Verghese, Kochi
More than a triumph of Buddhism, the Jhajjar conversions signify a failure of Hinduism to keep its followers faithful to itself.
Pratibha Mishra, Ahmedabad
Nearly half the letters published in your magazine are from Indians living overseas. Most of them tell us what is wrong with India now and how it can be put right. Why do you find it necessary to publish their mail? I can’t believe that you do not get enough letters from readers in India. The least you could do is give proportional representation.
Vijay S., Coimbatore
If your article The War of the Surfs (November 25) is really unbiased and Stallman is really what you describe, how come free software is such a threat (for example, 30 per cent of the corporate server market) that Microsoft is spending $500 mn on India just to prevent its spread? MP chief minister Digvijay Singh is probably an irresponsible politician for deciding to use free software rather than Microsoft’s. The same perhaps is true of leaders of many European countries, including Germany, France and the European parliament. Not to mention the US department of defence.
Bernard Lang, France
Outlook seems more eager than Gates himself to have Microsoft software in India. The least you could have done is to give us an idea of how much forex would go on Microsoft’s services. Remember some of our useful IT implementations—like the railway reservation system—is not based on Microsoft software.
Ajith Kumar, New Delhi
For the Free Software Foundation, free means freedom, not free as in free lunch. The idea is that the owner of a software has the freedom to modify or "repair" it as he likes. On the other hand, Microsoft and other proprietary software firms are building devices that control the computer you use and decide whether to permit you to install a software you want, or read a document you may have obtained. This is in the name of preventing piracy. But it is at the cost of taking way your freedom to do what you want.
V. Sasi Kumar, Thiruvananthapuram
Your cover story The Lightness of Well-Being (November 11) about our obsession with thinness rightly draws attention to our distorted sense of beauty. Sometime back, out of curiosity I had created a fictitious profile on a dating site, as a girl 22-25 years old, 5’5" tall and weighing 32 kg! I had highlighted the fact about being skinny. I had thought only a few guys would be interested in someone that skeletal. But to my surprise, I got about 100 responses in the next two days and about 500 now. A girl with that height and weight would hardly be in a position for dating, she’d be anorexic and in need of hospitalisation. This profile was imaginary but a dietician I spoke to told me that she had once helped a model 5’8" tall bring down her weight to less than 40 kg. It just goes to show the unrealistic ideas we have developed about beauty. and which many impressionable young girls are chasing. I’d suggest you do an article on anorexia nervosa to bring out all the dangers of being drastically underweight.
Sanatan Mukherji, Calcutta
My wife, who is lean and thin and was always suffering from a fat-gaining mania, read your cover story (The Lightness of Well-Being, November 11) and threw away all her namby-pamby complexities. She told me she was the happiest woman who at 34 weighs 44 kg. And it’s all thanks to Outlook.
A.K. Chakraborty, Bongaigaon, Assam
Thin mania and fat phobia,
It’s a mad fad in today’s India.
Reetan Ganguly, Tezpur
Apropos Less than Innocent (November 11), the man accused is my child’s class teacher and I have a few things to say in his defence. The boy in question has been at Mirambika only for three months while Manish Kumar has been there for two-and-a-half years. He does not even interact with the complainant’s class. He however has interacted with our children and taken them out on field trips to Rajasthan. The children also have nights out at school. But none of us have ever had reason to complain. In fact, when he was produced in Patiala House, 90 per cent of the parents of the class he teaches were there to support him. The problem is Manish Kumar does not have the contacts and will never be able to relate his side of the story. The press has already hung him before a trial.
Ratna Viswanathan, New Delhi
Mr Mehta, here’s my own Recipe for Anarchy (November 18. Since the right wing has all the solutions for our problems, let’s have Sudershan as PM, Thackeray as defence minister, Modi as home minister and Togadia as i&b minister!
R. Venkatesh Iyengar, Gulbarga
I’m appalled at the poor taste your story (Kama Chameleons, November 18) shows in writing about Swami Muktananda and his disciple Gurumayi. For one, to bracket them alongside yoga teachers such as b.k.s. Iyengar and Rodney Yee is to do them disservice since neither of them are mere teachers of yoga. The yoga Gurumayi teaches is mahayoga, the all-encompassing path which allows an individual to understand the non-duality that exists between himself and god. Obviously, you’ve not spoken to even one of the millions of devotees, leave alone read her teachings.
Rashme Sehgal, New Delhi
