Rags to Riches strategy – sell your Oscar child

After  the storm – the debris…

Slumdog Millionaire was one such storm to hit the Indian storm…we will be picking its debris for some time to come…

An example of this is the sordid drama being played out with Child star Rubina’s father allegedly trying to sell her off…

Denials and counter-denials are going to be thrown back and forth for some time to come till the media attention drifts…but one thing is for sure…there does appear to be more than a kernel of truth in the sting operation by the ‘News of the World’…Rubina’s father taking her daughter to a sheikh and discussing her ‘future’ smacks of something rotten, especially with previous cases involving sheikhs in the country…

So, for a moment let us consider that Rubina’s father did try to sell her off…then, let us try to look at the situation…

That Rafiq Qureshi (Rubina’s father) should be condemned and should be prosecuted is beyond doubt. Selling your children off is an act that is heinous beyond words…

But then, it is easy to condemn a man like him from where we sit…its easy being armchair judges…let us try and put ourselves in his shoes for just sometime and try to think like him before condemning him as the devil…

It is human nature to extract the maximum benefit from an advantageous situation. There is nothing immoral per se from such an attitude…its a fact of how we have evolved…we are capitalists by nature, not socialists…

Look at the one other star from the stable of the successful film – Frieda Pinto. Almost overnight she has been transported from a struggling also-ran to becoming the face of many a brand to even getting a chance to work in a Woody Allen movie. She does not let go of any chance to promote herself, her abilities and her new found connections and nor does the media tire of telling us her changed glamorous lifestyle – even telling us which shoes she now prefers…

Why the difference, we may ask. Boyle and co might be opening up funds to take care of Rubina and her future but nothing has happened as of yet and it may not. Remember ‘Salaam Bombay’, ‘Little Buddha’? There too, promises were made and broken…there are no happy precedences.

Pinto and Rubina. The same film…possibly the same amount of effort (when comparing a child and a trained actor) and the after the flashlights, the future seems absolutely different. One has been put in the stratosphere and the other one given sympathetic glances and told to get on with her life…

Too bad, we may say…life isnt fair, In any  case, Rubina got more than her ‘peers’ will ever get…she should be happy with it. Which is exactly the point…who decides?

Rafiq is smart – in a devious way or otherwise. He does not want to depend on transient sympathy and dubious promises. He just wants to make hay while the spotlight still shines. He knows very well that Rubina’s face will not be chose as the selling point of any brand. He also knows that she does not have a career in films except for some sympathy roles for some time. He cannot be faulted for thinking like that; in fact the way this world works, he has full justification for reasoning like that. Where the problem arises is in the manner he wants to make the hay.

In any case, he will not be the first parent (and not the last for sure)to want to make money out of their child’s success. Some flog their children to death with work and some just siphon off the money. Rafiq just went one step further. He crossed the line so to say.

The fault lies more with the way we and the media treats people caught in the spotlight. As long as they satisfy our needs – glamour, sympathy, success, we raise them on a pedestal and adulate them. The minute something else catches our attention, we simply run off leaving the old heroes cold and feeling abandoned. And this kind of behaviour is increasing in frequency with our nano-second attention span.

It would lead to a host of psychological problems not only for the one directly in the spotlight (especially for someone like Rubina who would feel totally out of depth in this new world that she has been thrust in) but also those on the edges of the light’s arcs. Its not something that people who have not been in that situation can grasp easily.

Which is why it is easy to simplify and condemn.

So condemn Rafiq’s act by all means. He deserves all of it and more. But let us also try to see the other forces at play that are not so easily obvious and then perhaps the inhuman act will start to make some sense.

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Ghajini - anatomy of a success with only fluff

Its official - one of the worst movies of the year has become an all time grosser (see the article here), proving once again that more often than not, intelligent, innovative and intense marketing leads to huge profits even though the movie content and quality can be atrociously poor.

Watching Ghajini was one of the most traumatically boring experiences of my movie-going existence. It literally came to a point where you could predict the next frame. The underlying concept was of course that of the cult movie - Memento and is a fascinating one. The storyline built on that concept in the Bollywood avatar, though, was wafer thin and full of holes that a child fed on cartoons can spot; not to mention that the film dragged on for atleast 90 minutes more than it should have. The action was implausible and laughable at times. The narrative was weak and there was no thread binding the pieces of the past and present. There were unnecessary characters throughout the movie, who, in retrospect were superfluous.

The funny thing about it was that I knew all of this even before I went to see the movie. The question then is - why did I go on a cold January morning when I could have been sleeping peacefully in my quilt? The answer is this - Marketing, both of the movie and of the actor - Aamir Khan. So even though reliable sources tell you not to waste your money, you still want to go and see what all the fuss is all about.

Perversely, you also want to see how bad can it really get, considering that this was the famed "one movie a year" actor's movie and the next venture after "Taare Zameen Par", probably one of the best movies to come out of Bollywood.

So, what marketing books simply call 'personality branding' was acting itself out in real life and people flocked to see the movie all over, thus pushing up the cash register. Many people simply wanted to see the new all muscle look of Aamir with the gangster hairstyle, deuce with the story, which was turned simply into a revenge drama with lots of outlandish fight sequences.

 

The profit conscious producers got it straight on the bull eye of  course. If the hindi version had tried to replicate the memento's complex pyschological environment (which takes very close viewing to get an idea of what exactly might be transpiring) and especially the disorienting reverse chronological sequencing, the movie would have been deemed complex and would have taken the focus away from Aamir and on to the story, not something that would have made long queues.

It would have been hailed as a new bold style of film-making in Bollywood and would have become a cult classic but not much else. The movie going population love a good story but apparently not enough to make the movie a top - grosser. Otherwise, "Taare Zameen Par" or "A Wednesday" would have taken that slot.

So, in ending, the only positive that I can glean from all of this is that in times of recession, one more avenue has opened up for marketing MBAs - the movie industry; the trickle moving there can change into a torrent!!!

Since content is usually not the strongest point of an MBA education but imagery is, we would be suited for such roles. Maybe we should call them next on campus.

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