There is an odious culture that has rampantly followed a path which only exhibits how dubiously one could destroy individuals, with malicious bias, simply because it thrived on the shoulders of a medium, which had the power to form opinion.

I am not sufficiently literate enough to challenge their views or comment. But I shall make myself literate enough to challenge any personal unjustified and prejudiced accusation.

I place before you the scanned version of an article written by Jug Suraiya of Times of India. I urge you to read the article thoroughly and repeatedly to be able to do justice to my response to it. My response is long and exhaustive. It has taken me a while to compose it after due research and effort. It is there now for all to assess and judge.

Yes, I confirm and with some vehemence - if you shall abuse me unjustly, I shall not hesitate to pay you back justly !!

In a free society there cannot be a select community that shall have the liberty and protection of passing judgment without answerability. Nor can such community have the liberty to be free from corruption in a corrupt environment. Nor can they be the sole protectors of society or moral soldiers, when their own credentials fall gravely short.

I am but a small and insignificant metaphor in this huge ocean of knowledge and principles. I may have erred and for that I shall express regret and pardon. But when I have not I shall seek redress and pardon. That is my constitutional birthright !

April 1^st 2009

The Editor in Chief

The Times of India Newspaper

Mumbai

Dear Sir

Re: Subverse. Slumdog Divide, by Jug Suraiya, 2nd of March 2009

After much critical reflection, I write to you with regard to the above article for which you hold editorial responsibility and thus for which you are accountable.

I accuse the journalist Jug Suraiya of failing his professional ethical code of conduct by means of wilful error in the collection of facts. I would like to assume that the reason for his failure is due to a rare episode of sheer cerebral inertia, rather than for the sake of either exploiting my public name as a mere foil for his argument, or worse, for that of good copy.

He should be thoroughly ashamed of himself, not only as a professional journalist but as a human being. Mere opinion and ill-supported prejudice are as contemptible in both species.

All quotations from his article I have italicised for clear reference.

I refer to the film, Slum Dog Millionaire, as SM, for ease.

Herewith I list his factual blunders:

1. My Blog did not ‘spark off the current round of controversy on India’s poverty’. If he had actually done his research and followed the current debate, Jug Suraiya would have been aware that this was not the case.

The correct narrative is as follows.

Two journalists sparked this ‘hoo-ha’, writing for the Guardian Newspaper UK and both resident in Delhi. They brought my purported comments on SM to an international stage on the 14^th of January this year. These - dare I say purported - journalists, both brazenly cut and pasted passages from my Blog into unrecognisable gutter-press filth. It was a purely cynical exercise on their part. Please adequately apprise yourself of Day 265 and 267 of my Blog for the facts at this time: http://bigb.bigadda.com/2009/01/13/day-265/ The intent of my Blog is beyond misinterpretation. I presented opposing points of view on the film, maintaining a clear position of neutrality in order to encourage debate amongst my fellow bloggers. I also corrected the subsequent error as swiftly as I could, by writing to the editor of the Guardian. This can also be viewed on my Blog: http://bigb.bigadda.com/2009/01/20/day-270i/ Additionally, I spoke to Danny Boyle, the director of SM, to clear up the error with him personally, an incident that was also reported by your newspaper. Thus this episode has been brought to its ultimate end, and so it should be duly laid to rest. Jug Suraiya flogs a dead horse.

2. The reference to the fifty lakh donation to a temple in the same sentence as the marital disposition of my daughter-in-law as ‘manglik’ is not only disgusting, but should have been picked up by you and corrected before publication. I came in person to you, at my own instigation and of my own volition. I confronted your entire editorial staff in your offices. There, on your premises, after I had presented a faithful account of the private events surrounding my son’s marriage, and answered any queries from those who still voiced doubt, your editorial team acknowledged that these allegations were unfounded and erroneous. May I remind you of our conversations herewith. My daughter-in-law has only ever been held as an absolute blessing in my family: the charge of ‘manglik’ was invented by those in the media with vicious intent, and dispersed by ignorant professional colleagues who failed to verify the truth of the charge, that we undertook any ritual for the correction of the astrological status of Aishwarya Rai, or felt even vaguely inclined to do so. The fifty lakh donation to the Tirupati temple was also clarified at the time as a gift absolutely unrelated to any ‘manglik’ predicament. In the context of Jug Suraiya’s article, it provides sweet irony. Perhaps you are unaware that the state-run authorities of the temple have a scheme that invites donations for the feeding of the poor, free of charge. I had requested my donation for this specific use, and I am told that approximately thirty thousand are fed there every day. I do not, in Jug Suraiya’s words, ignore the material poverty around me, but I also do not wear my charitable endeavours on my sleeve to win brownie points from the likes of him.

Beyond mere factual error, Jug Suraiya’s structure of argument is ill-conceived.

His problem is not only one of how to address poverty in India, but one of how to address wealth. His lack of coherence on the matter is deeply disappointing. He fails to convince me that his argument is free of a prejudice that as much abhors those poorer as those wealthier than he: guilt for the former, resentment for the latter.

As much as poverty is not a shameful crime, neither is wealth. My wealth is not shameful. I am not ashamed of it. I am an actor; I have a profession. Whatever I possess has been earned through hard work without corruption and in clear conscience. I have made it without ‘suppressing knowledge’. I have made it, lost it, and made it again and repaid my creditors. And, I have scrupulously and enthusiastically paid my taxes and shareholders. To use Jug Suraiya’s turn of phrase, I refuse to be considered by his ilk as a specimen of ‘dirty laundry’ that must be ritually beaten clean, with my fellow citizens as witness. I refuse to be hauled out regularly by the Media for public humiliation purely because my endurance is considered a cultural embarrassment by them. Considering the behaviour of a number of my far wealthier countrymen and women, I refuse to be a convenient or an appropriate target for Jug Suraiya’s snobbery. He may turn up his nose at my commercial endorsement of ‘the world’s most expensive suiting material’, but I am proud to represent such a fine example of India’s great industrial heritage, that of the production of textiles.

Nor am I ashamed of anything about my country. I may be highly critical in judgement, as any citizen of any nation should be, of the society to which I hold allegiance. In this light, I do not find that material poverty in India is ‘a terrible family secret’ as Jug Suraiya alleges. Yes, I don’t need to step out of my own family house to know that such poverty surrounds me. No, I certainly don’t need to see a film to acknowledge it either: any Indian will be confronted with it on a daily basis, if not at each breathing moment. It is humanly impossible to ignore. Jug Suraiya’s extreme response to SM begs the question of his preferred choice of company: those who are chronically desensitised to the suffering of others or those who can only respond to it by impotent guilt. Or perhaps he was merely suffering a bout of misanthropy towards his fellow beings after a bad day. Either way, he does not offer in his article a view of our country that I recognise.

Poverty in any country is a fact of life in our era – and I dare anyone to extract this phrase, which on its own could be easily misinterpreted, from the body of my whole response and flog it publicly - particularly as it is often measured in comparative terms within a country (even the richest), as much as between them. But beyond measurement, there is also the meaning of poverty that deserves redress. Here I accuse Jug Suraiya of a pauperised conception of poverty. There are many forms of poverty: material, educational, health, cultural, and political. India has its fair share of all of these. Just because a person suffers material poverty does not mean that they suffer absolute poverty. Just because someone doesn’t have any money doesn’t mean that they are poor. India is, by contrast to its material want, culturally infinitely rich in most realms of human possibility, and I refuse to lose sight of this outstanding and generative form of wealth with which we are blessed and that we all share. I am not splitting hairs here: ‘poverty’ ceases to be a useful word unless it is carefully defined.

We are also rich in a heritage of reasoned argumentation, and long may we be so. If in doubt, please refer to Amartya Sen’s great book, ‘The Argumentative Indian’, and find that if you disagree with him, then you make his point in the process.

‘Slumdog Millionaire has created a deep divide among India’s urbangentsia where none should exist’, writes Jug Suraiya.

Divided ?

Jug Suraiya seems worried here. I am not. Quite the opposite: being divided in opinion is not a problem. We are blessed in our multitude views: complex issues should produce a broad range of differing opinion in a healthy culture and free society, and we must thoroughly exercise our human right to disagree with each other. May we long do so in our generality, with civility, accuracy, and sound reasoning. May I remind Jug Suraiya in particular that the means of agreeing with each other must be by sustained rational persuasion. May I also remind him as well that I defend until death his right to disagree with me, but only by means of rational argument, not by that of irrational prejudice.

I argue that India needs more wealth, as much as less poverty, and with that greater wealth, greater investment in the provision of equality of opportunity on the ground through a good public health and education system and the provision of basic social security. We live in a liberal democracy that espouses social justice, not an authoritarian regime that imposes equality of absolute outcome from above.

Where Jug Suraiya and I agree is that India, sixty years after Independence, has been unable to lift much of its vast population out of absolute material poverty. However, the tragic consequences for those who have not benefited from India’s economic growth do not eclipse in failure our efforts as a nation. It would be a deep ingratitude to discount so easily the heroic industry of innumerable individuals since 1947 towards the betterment of all. We have tried as a nation; now we must simply try harder. Thus I agree, material poverty in India is a most serious and pressing issue in our time. However, unlike Jug Suraiya, I do not exploit - in ignorance - the public name of another individual merely as a foil in an argument about poverty’s cultural visibility. ‘The real Slumdog divide is not between the haves and the have-nots; it’s between the hopers and the hope-nots’, says Jug Suraiya, implying thereby that the eradication of poverty merely hinges on the capacity to hope. Hope is not the point. The point is the binding nature of an oath. We made our vow at Independence, enshrined in our constitution:

· Article 21: the right to life. The right to lead a ‘meaningful, complete and dignified life’. The definition of the word ‘life’ in this context also includes ‘the right to live in fair and reasonable conditions’. http://www.legalserviceindia.com/articles/art222.htm.

· Article 21A: the fundamental right to education, which flows from the right to life

· The right to life and liberty, as well as Directive Principles of State Policy, Articles 42 and 47: the justiciability of the right to health

Thus we have a constitutional legal duty to uphold the rights of all Indian citizens, and their wider implications of implementation by the State. Those amongst us who ignore or despair (the ‘hope-nots’ of Jug Suraiya’s article) of the material poverty, educational poverty and poverty of health of our fellow citizens betray the founding document of our freedom as a nation.

Interestingly, Jug Suraiya has lost sight of the global industrial context and commercial meaning of SM, which surely have some measure of relevance on the subject of India’s material wealth prospects, and hence its correlative poverties. In Jug Suraiya’s material ‘reality’, there is much economic significance attached to this particular film. The facts are as follows:

‘Bollywood is the biggest film industry in the world in terms of viewers, with an audience of more than 3 billion, compared with Hollywood’s 2.6 billion in global ticket sales.’ (Reuters)

‘Revenues from India’s film industry, valued at about $1.75 billion in 2006, are forecast to nearly double to $3.4 billion by 2010, according to estimates by PricewaterhouseCoopers, although these revenues stand at half of what one Hollywood studio - Walt Disney - made in box office revenues in 2006’ (ibid.)

SM is a deeply symbolic foot through the cinematic door into the vast domestic Indian market by the Western film industry. Why else would Hollywood have been so wildly ecstatic about a small budget British outfit with American funding? It is time for Jug Suraiya to wake up and smell the Starbucks.

Indeed, this most basic oversight I consider to be a manifestation of a most odious whiff in Jug Suraiya’s article. It is the common ‘disease’ rife amongst the so-called ‘urbangentsia’: that of neurotic self-referentiality. The dead-end obsession with their own identity at the expense of the realities of anyone else. At its worst, this self-referentiality is infested with effete self-loathing, born from that kind of masochistic conscience possessed by the culturally decadent, infected with the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of a self-styled elite who confuse their own egoism and class prejudices with genuine social conscience. In this particular context of the public debate on the merits of SM, these ‘urbangentsia’ end up exploiting the film merely to air their own self-referential anxieties about their identity in both India and the world.

Above and beyond economic considerations, or any other consideration for that matter, SM’s overriding purpose is not primarily a window for the world into India’s poverty. Jug Suraiya himself inadvertently notes this in his article. He writes that Nargis ‘accused Satyajit Ray of “exporting” India’s poverty through films like Pather Panchali, which is arguably one of the finest and most moving films ever to come out [sic] of this country’. Satyajit Ray’s film is not an export. It is art. SM is not primarily about his own or his socio-economic group’s cultural self-consciousness. It is art. It is a good story, and hence from which many - even opposing - reflections can be drawn. One could indeed ‘decry all depictions of [poverty] as commercial exploitation and social and cultural voyeurism’, as much as think ‘the ‘slumdogs’ in the film are feisty, irrepressible individuals fighting against all odds the system that seeks to victimise them’. They are both legitimate and interesting points of view. Whether one likes the film or not, the point is that it is art, and as an art object, it deserves to be treated accordingly as having a creative autonomy of its own. Art is not merely a social critique, historical document or political football. Art’s purpose is to be ultimately purposeless; art should not be derogated to being merely useful for something else. For example, art must not be harnessed as a means of implementing social policy by the state: if this occurs, then art becomes propaganda, not art. Ultimately, art must have the freedom to exist in the world without any reference to anything else other than itself. Any other view demonstrates a lack of aesthetic development in the viewer, listener, reader. Come to think of it, any other view manifests a form of aesthetic poverty. Add it to the list of possible poverties a human being may suffer.

Here I wish to take further issue with Jug Suraiya’s article. I turn to an underlying attitude that infiltrates the very core of his argument. This cancer (to continue Jug Suraiya’s metaphor of ‘disease’) alarms me more than anything else about his ‘Subverse’, and it is indeed most damagingly subversive in nature. Jug Suraiya focuses on how SM flouts our amour propre, shames our conscience, that a mirror has been held up to our visage by the Other, in this case, by ‘The West’. What I find so deeply disturbing about his article is that by implication, SM offers a more truthful, authoritative reflection of our country than any of our own self-representations. Colonialism is not just about a foreign power invading the geographical territory of another civilisation and ruling over its lands. Colonialism’s invasion runs deeper. It invades and monopolises the power of identity. By privileging SM as a reflection of this Other’s mirror, Jug Suraiya implicitly relinquishes our power of identity as a nation.

Shiv Visvanathan, in his erudite, well-argued and fascinating article in the The Indian Express, A tale of two cities, writes that Delhi-6 was met with ‘quiet silence’ (Shiv Visvanathan’s words). http://www.indianexpress.com/news/a-tale-of-two-cities/427719/1

I offer my humble apologies to the author if I fail to adequately paraphrase him, but I am confident enough that I have not misunderstood his point, and that it is most pertinent to the above debate on the cultural bias towards foreign representations of India’s identity, privileged above our own.

He makes a comparative analysis between SM and Delhi-6, wherein both are presented as mythical ‘readings’ of contemporary India, wherein both attempt to ‘mirror’. ‘It is only on seeing Delhi-6 that one realised that Slumdog creates the myth of Bollywood in a hall of mirrors by inverting, inflating and reversing it.’ (ibid.) Despite the value of both films, Shiv Visvanathan concludes that Delhi-6 offers an insight above and beyond that of SM: ‘The message is clear; one can’t be free till a community is also free [My emphasis]. It is here that Delhi-6 brilliantly adds something that Danny Boyle does not understand. Despite the myth of information and the ersatz attempts to see the city as a knowledge society, Bollywood provides a theory of culture.’ ‘In a quiet [sic] way, a small film on Chandini Chowk tells Slumdog Millionaire it has not quite grasped Bollywood or India. Information can never substitute for the complexity of culture. Every stupid Indian knows that.’ (ibid.) That ‘community’ is India.

Respectful as I am of film as an ultimately distinct medium of art, above all other considerations, that is not deserving of being reduced to a socio-political football, I have written in a more informal capacity on Day 308 of my Blog:

‘Showing mirror in SM is ok.. and in D6 is not ! Bas..! End of conversation.’

http://bigb.bigadda.com/2009/02/25/day-308/

Thus, I fiercely refute Jug Suraiya’s argument as not only Orientalist (by this I mean a Western imposition of meaning on any non-Western peoples); it is not only a haunting historical echo, or should I say ill wind, of pre-Independence colonised India; but it is also deeply undermining to the subjective autonomy - the freedom - of our nation. This is, undoubtedly, his most pathological subversion. Undoubtedly, it was not intended. As a nation we have primary and ultimate authority in how we go about defining ourselves. That is the central promise of our Declaration of Independence in 1947: the regaining of our power over our own identity, individual and collective, material and cultural. Such power, such freedom, is the source of human dignity.

In the light of the intellectual and professional incontinence of Jug Suraiya’s article, I contend that merely acknowledging how culpable we all are in the continuance of ‘disowned [material] poverty’ and engaging in some ritual hand-wringing is about as useless as all his publicly aired gastric wind. If he is indeed so keen to recognise the harsh ‘reality’ of material poverty and thus live hopefully for the future, then I challenge him to tell us whether he has done something material to meet that materiality. Done something practical, rather than merely ‘recognise its reality’. The eradication of poverty does not seem to highly correlate with the capacity to recognise it. Otherwise, it would have long since been achieved. I am not deaf to the multitude of voices in our country who strenuously address the issue of material poverty with passion and commitment, and have devoted their lives to the endeavour, rather than the odd article in a column. I should think neither is Jug Suraiya hard of hearing, when he further reflects upon his awareness of such valour in his fellow citizens.

Do something practical, rather than merely ‘recognise its reality’. After all, Jug Suraiya may find his greatest talent yet - and even relief - in the rolling up of sleeves and the digging of new sanitary facilities with his own hands. He could not only do with some such facilities for his own scatological literary tropes. It would at the very least salve something of his civic conscience, redeeming himself by their proper hygienic disposal. He could even provide some basic material sanitation for a few of his fellow citizens so that their children don’t die so needlessly.

Do something practical, rather than merely recognise the reality of poverty. It is the duty of active citizenship for all of us.

The manner in which the Media so frequently falls victim to false whisperings, to news conflagrations of gossip-mongering hearsay from self-appointed, ruthlessly ambitious, over-opinionated and intellectually inferior hacks with their eyes narrowly focused on their own media visibility, undoubtedly causes you grave concern. That your own esteemed associate editor, Jug Suraiya, has himself fallen victim to Media propaganda, is an indictment of its wild intoxications.

A free – that is, open, transparent, accountable - information news media is the bedrock of a democracy. Its professionals are our constitutional guardians, our moral gatekeepers. Freedom can only exist within the just and self-imposed rule of law – hence the significance of our constitutional right to life. Thus the freedom of the information news media only exists within the parameters of its own self-regulation: it must abide by its own professional code of practice. It is both its great privilege, and heavy duty, to inform us, and to influence and guide our opinion in so doing. Such an example as I have given, of indulgence in unprofessional practice and poor argument, is sad testament to our present national political and civic health, if left uncorrected.

I do not ignore material poverty. I do not ignore the political poverty of failing to uphold our constitutional rights and duties. I do not ignore cultural poverty. I do not ignore aesthetic poverty. I do not ignore the poverty of identity subjected to colonial impositions. And I do not ignore a poverty of thought in the professional body that guides our civic consciousness.

I have no desire to see The Times of India Newspaper commit the grave act of slander with impunity or the abuse of public accountability. It pains me. Prior to the publication of Jug Suraiya’s ‘Slumdog Divide’, it has been impossible for me to ignore the profusion of articles in the Media of similar prejudicial attitude and erroneous content about my views on SM. However, due to the distinct authority, and thus weighty responsibility, of the Times of India in the life of our nation, I now choose to reply.

I demonstrate my profound respect for the institution of The Times in particular, and for the profession of journalism at large, by the act of response. I demonstrate my profound respect for the right of response in the public domain with the witness of my peers. I demonstrate my profound respect by exercising the duty of as measured and reasoned a reply as I am able. I urge you to act upon my response accordingly and without delay. One of the great newspapers of the largest democracy in the world is under your stewardship: as a fellow citizen I call upon the dignity of your freedom to redress mine, mine as an individual, and mine as an Indian.

Yours sincerely,

Amitabh Bachchan

There is reference to an article in the Indian Express. I produce that for your benefit also -

I end my rather long discourse of today and apologize to you for taking up so much of your time, energy and space -

I shall remain in your hearts - even in the most trying conditions -

Amitabh Bachchan