Indian authorities are too obsessed with projecting India the beautiful way. But one thing they forget is, it is extremely difficult to keep the truth buried in this globalized ‘wired’ world. This is the age of tweets. So good news or bad news…news will come out unless you try to brutally bury it. It is a fact that no Indians like to see their country projected as a land of ‘poor hungry Indians’. Slumdog Millionaire has done enough damage. But then it did some good also. The Dharavi slum of Mumbai benefited a lot from that kind of negative publicity. They got donations and help etc which never came from Mumbai municipality. And the slum kids who acted got rich over night. Off late the Indian authorities have accused Kevin McCloud, the television presenter, of damaging Indian tourism industry by making "poverty porn". Kevin is a UK television guy and host of the series called ‘Grand Designs’. Recently he got filming permit from Indian authorities in London to shoot in Mumbai. The Indians giving him the permit were under the impression that Kevin is going to shoot the architectural beauties of the city of Mumbai. Instead Kevin has shot Dharavi slum with all its dirt, squalor and stench under the title of ‘Slumming It’. “We thought it would be about the architecture of Mumbai but it was only about slums, nothing else. He was showing dirty sewage and dead rats, children playing amongst rubbish and people living in these small rooms. He never talked about architecture at all.” told an official from the Indian High Commision in UK. They are planning to lodge a complaint with Ofcom, the UK media watchdog, about the content of McCloud's Channel 4 series, ‘Slumming It’.The West knows India as the land of Taj Mahal, spicy curries, snake charmers, Yoga, and its iconic poverty. Despite India’s furious GDP growth the impression hasn’t changed much. In the US, impressions about have changed a lot about India but in UK the situations remains dismal. Whose fault is it? I will accuse the Indian Authorities for this. Incompetent bunch of bureaucrats are manning the travel and tourism ministry. And the minister is least interested in the job. It is their responsibility to project India, market India, and sell it to the global tourists. You just cannot shout and hit people coming to this country and shooting the dirt and squalor. Why do you have it in the first place even after 60 years of glorious freedom? The way the divide between rich and the poor is growing in India, I guess only more and more people will be coming down from UK to check out the declining poverty levels. And you cannot ban them. You simply do not have the firepower to take them on.
Recently I liked a TV commercial from Olympus. It holds a lesson for the idiots in the tourism ministry. A foreigner comes and clicks a photo of a typical poor Indian panwalah with his expensive camera. The panwalah in turn takes out his small cheaply priced Olympus camera and clicks the picture of the foreigner. Tit for tat? And I can sense the panwalah shouting ‘teri to’ to the foreigner. Babus at the Indian embassy at London and the tourism ministry…do you get the message? If somebody deliberately wants to pull you down you need to respond in an intelligent way.
But then when out of every three Indian politicians one has a criminal record…you cannot expect much from these ‘inglorious bastards’. Can you?
