Africa Speaks Reasoning Forum

I read the article below and was reminded of my own approach to Indian movies.

Growing up in an Indian household put me in a position to appreciate Indian movies and music to a great extent. Many of the Bollywood (think Hollywood in India) films portray romantic relations between a male and female, Usually interspersed by many song and dance numbers.

A lot of these movies never portray strong female roles. On many occasions, it portrays women as docile, subservient and religious. There are few roles to choose as a female in India, you can be the female lead, the mother, the sister, the best friend, the slutty girl, the item girl, the widowed mother that never marries, the subservient mother, the gossiping aunt...
Most times, the female lead usually ends up becoming demure if she was portrayed as wild.

The following article http://www.buzzfeed.com/regajha/ways-bollywood-is-contributing-to-rape-culture-in-india (http://www.buzzfeed.com/regajha/ways-bollywood-is-contributing-to-rape-culture-in-india) states that

"Since details of a horrific New Delhi gang rape galvanized India in December 2012, women’s safety has been a central topic of national conversation.
As a result, a lot of people have taken to examining cultural factors that contribute to the region-wide misogyny and to the ubiquity of gender-related violence.
As India’s largest driver of mainstream popular culture, Bollywood has received a lot of this scrutiny.

Bollywood, churning out films at a rate of a thousand per year, is far and away the largest film industry in the world. More pertinently, at a viewership around 50 million, the industry reaches more Indians than any other cultural phenomenon."

"Ways Bollywood contributes...
1.Bollywood’s male protagonists (arguably the closest thing Indian boys and men have to role models) are all characterized by machismo and violence.
2. Compounded with the flaws in its presentation of masculinity is the fact that Bollywood does not typically showcase strong female characters.
3.With few exceptions, every Bollywood movie is punctuated by one hypersexualized off-plot song and dance routine called an “item number.”
4.Despite mainstream news and media outlets seriously discussing issues of gender-related violence and sexual assault, Bollywood’s treatment of those issues has remained problematic and frivolous.
5.Eve-teasing is a contentious euphism, used in India and in parts of South Asia, for public sexual harassment of women by men.
6.Although it is fair to say women are objectified in popular culture all over the world, Bollywood’s methods of doing it are much more in your face.
7.All these are exacerbated by the fact that under the pretext of entertaining the masses, some filmmakers evade accountability for how their films might be misinterpreted by a largely uneducated and impressionable audience."