Rooting for Freida

My dad's a journalist, of the old-fashioned kind - he's from the time when journalism really meant the things the word still implies - the pursuit of truth, moral courage, social responsibility, ethics. K's from a different generation, but journalism still meant something during his time, which is probably why he finds it easier to talk shop with my dad than with the young, cocky twenty or thirty-somethings who call themselves journalists these days. The degeneration of journalism into pointless muck-raking; frothy, nonsensical, never-ending pieces about Bollywood and the incomprehensible world of fashion; and partisan reporting has been around for very many years now, but I was reminded of it all over again this morning when I read the cover story published in a supplement of one of Cal's leading - and still much-respected, a respect it's increasingly ceasing to deserve - dailies, on Slumdog Millionaire's leading actress (or should I say one of the leading actresses) Freida Pinto.

Quite unnecessarily spiteful and vituperative, it proceeded to make the point that Freida Pinto is a mere flash-in-the-pan, a nonentity who merely got lucky (and, through barbs and innuendos, managed to convey the impression that she did not deserve that luck - after all, she's just like hundreds of other young women, and hey, all she had was 15 minutes of screen time, in which she was really not given much to do), and is now living it up. Laced at appropriate intervals with nasty comments by people, most of whom happen to be columnists of the paper in question, the article left a rather nasty taste in my mouth, not least because of how pointless it was. Considering that all of India's rushing to lay claim to Slumdog, which is, to all intents and purposes, a British film, and not a very good one at that, one would have thought that the success of one of the Indian actors would have made the country legitimately proud. I guess not, though, at least not while we have vicious, envious people who can write - or get someone to write - scurrilous articles aimed at pulling people who've surpassed them down.

It's undoubtedly true the Freida's got lucky. It's also true that she didn't have much to do in the film, and that the younger Latikas outshone her. But the same can also be said of Dev Patel. Is the reason why Freida's 15 minutes is being sneered at while Aishwarya Rai's 15 minutes in the mediocre The Pink Panther 2 is being lauded because Freida was, before the phenomenal success of Slumdog, a virtual nonentity? And because she's making it to the Tonight Show and has caught Woody Allen's attention while the other Bollywood actresses who routinely talk about their 'Hollywood projects' haven't? Or because, while our esteemed media loves talking about 'feel-good', 'rags-to-riches' stories, they haven't found it in themselves yet to embrace the people who actually make it? How can the same media be so proud of A.R. Rahman and Resul Pookutty, who it hadn't even heard of previously, but not of Freida Pinto?

I've shot off a letter of protest, which I'm certain will never be published, the concerned newspaper not being too bothered with opinions different from theirs; I do hope, however, that Freida's Hollywood ventures pay off, and she emerges a star - then, when the very same media falls over themselves to court her, I shall take an especial glee in writing them another letter, reminding them of the time when they informed her 'there's nothing to be so kicked about', as her success was merely due to 'luck by chance'.