Itsy bitsy thingies.

A shoe-string budget ! I heard…. I was trying to figure out the meaning of that when I realized I shouldn’t look too far. The Bollywood (the film industry of Mumbai/Bombay) was the answer. Now you would ask me how this could possibly be when one hears that the film budget runs in crores! Oh well but the heroine’s budget is always hanging on a shoe string. Those itsy-bitsy thingies! The crores are spent on the lavish sets, the hero’s wardrobe and other technical matters and when it comes to our poor heroine….. whats left but a shoe-string.
It defies all reason how the heroine can prance in snowy locales in a mini skirt or in earlier times in gauzy chiffons and a barely there blouse when the hero was totally bundled in his designer woolies. In these computerized times one can say that they were not really there.. the scenes have been superimposed or something…. But what about in the non comp era. I don’t think superimposition of frames is the answer otherwise what would these lovely foreign locales do without Yash Chopra! So to keep their economy booming our heroines are back to shoestrings.
I remember a Marathi stand up comedian once commented that thank God there are no rag pickers on the sets otherwise they might just misunderstand the itsy-bitsies and then what would be the plight of the heroines?
But again theres a paradox in the shoestring budget. This I realized on watching a few Hindi movies. When they want to show that the heroine comes from a poor family she’s fully clothed ( in hindi movies it’s called being “ghar ki izzat”/ family honour ). So the father might not have money to eat but his daughter is fully clothed and when the heroine is shown to be from a rich family she gets to wear all these itsy-bitsies…. Why is that I might ask? Isn’t she “ghar ki izzat “? Or being rich means you have none of that what so ever. Or is it that the lavish houses shown to make us understand that they are rich cost so much that again the heroine’s budget hangs by a string. Just a thought here…which flashed through my mind…… don’t go by the lavish houses either…. It took me more than half of the movie Devdas (Bhansali’s… I had not seen the earlier ones and had not read the novel either…. So went to see the movie with no background about the plot) to understand that Paro came from a poor family and that was the hitch! The reason for their families not agreeing to the union. Looking at the sets I didn’t even have the faintest that Paro was from a poor family. It was only after three-quarters were over that theres a scene where the roof in her house is leaking and the mother saying something about not having the money for repairs….. this was the time when I actually came out of my seat and nearly yelled “Eureka”
Anyways sorry for digressing…. With women empowerment being at the fore front I do hope these heroines put there collective pretty feet firmly down and ask for more budget (substantially more) for their wardrobes or a medical insurance at the very least to save them the cost of treating Pneumonia.