Due to the resulting mental and physical drainage, I wanted to watch something that didn't really involve a lot of energy and effort to understand, so of course the obvious choice was a Shahrukh Khan movie. Regardless of what you feel about the man, you can agree that you don't have to spare a lot of brain cells to enjoy one of his movies.

No amount of brain cells would be able to explain this anyway.

After 3 hours, I was pretty much shocked at what had transpired. I responded immediately by opening up xvideos again to watch some more porn, because some things are just top priority damnit! But once I had finished, I came here to start typing this post.

Swades is secretly racist. And it's not the good old desi racism, where you just laugh at Madrasis, or crack Sardarji jokes, or decide the national government based on which caste is getting the most freebies. We are totally okay with that. Swades is the other kind of racism- the kind that fills us up with oh-such-righteous-anger-because-we-could-never-be-so-evil, righteous anger we normally reserve for crappy Bollywood films.

Swades is what looks like a nationalistic film but is the opposite of it- it is a piece of white supremacist propaganda that is espousing, among other things, the White Man's burden, the stupidity of Indians and their need for a foreign superpower to govern them. Of course, like all brilliant propaganda films, it is so subtle in putting forth its ideas that you probably walked away from it with a patriotism boner, without realizing the Inceptionistic way it planted ideas in your head, ideas that we'll look at now.

We are seeing the entire story through SRK's eyes, and apart from making everyone look taller than they are, it also makes everyone look like an insufferable buffoon. Every single person SRK meets in India is a walking petition for forced lobotomy. The people in the village study up till Class IV, and then quit school, because this is India, where no good can come from studying Class V.

Apparently, they seem to have a good point.

The sole exception is the postman, the most intelligent guy in the village, because he miraculously managed to pass out of school. Despite this incredible achievement, he's still a dumbass who doesn't even know what the Internet is in 2005. Yes, the movie claims the existence of a Class XII Indian student who is oblivious to the existence of internet porn.

That student grew up to become who we know and love as Alok Nath ji.

The main storyline in the lack of electricity in the village, and the villagers being cool with it. Because with no electricity, there is darkness. Darkness as in no light, as in no enlightenment. Get it? That's about as allegorical as you can get in an SRK movie, propaganda or no propaganda. Now the villagers are so fucked over in their misery that it's the only thing they know, and they actively resist any attempts at improvement. So of course only some foreign intervention can save them, which brings us to the next point.

And now you think- this is where the article falls apart. The only white guy in the movie is some fattie at NASA (yes NASA, because that is the only company SRK would ever work for in America). There's no other white men in the movie. It's only Shahrukh who is saving desis from the hazards of Rs. 0 electricity bills and ignoring CBSE education. But that's where  you're wrong. Shahrukh IS the white man in the movie.

Or at least, a proxy for the white man. We know at the start of the movie that his citizenshit request has been approved by USA, which means they find in him the douchebaggily impressive qualities that are required of Americans. So SRK is not like the rest of the Indians in the movie- he wears pants, doesnt wash his ass with water, and isn't a lazy and ignorant bum. SRK is a desi who is not a moron because he hangs out with white people at NASA. The movie makes it perfectly clear that he was not only living abroad but had the lucky privilege of studying and benefitting from the Western education system too.

Benefits that no doubt included the West's greatest assets.

And it is these wonderful things by virtue of which SRK is the only man in the movie who knows what the fuck is wrong with everyone and what exactly needs to be done to fix it. It isn't SRK saving the desis, SRK is just a tool (in more ways than one). It is the White man using SRK as a messenger to impart his eternally superior wisdom to us primitives, which actually happens in a sequence where he rants about everything wrong with this country and why it's our own fault.

Which should be okay. He did back up his constant bitching by installing that water turbine thing that generated electricity for the entire village. Job well done. Nothing to complain about. Oh, except that...

SRK sets up an independent electricity supply for the villagers in the movie, thus opening up their natural world to such indispensable amenities as reality television, BDSM porn and more SRK movies. SRK then returns home, (home being America, because White supremacy) and the movie should have ended then and there.

But no. Sitting in America, SRK decides that no, the people still need his help. Note that he's already fixed the only problem he perceived them to have, but that is seemingly not enough. The poor, stupid villagers need SRK's angrezi leadership and guidance to save themselves from self-destruction, which was exactly the same line of reasoning used by colonial douchebags Britan and America to rape the third world for centuries, under the excuse of 'civilizing' it, whether or not the third world wanted to be civilized was totally irrelevant to the whole discussion. SRK therefore makes a glorious return complete with song sequence to civilize us in the wonderful ways of the west.

"So kids, that is what a porn movie is all about."

The movie of course doesn't dwell too much into what exactly happens after SRK returns, but doesn't leave too much to the imagination- the reason SRK first showed up in the village was to 'liberate' a stupid old hag back to America for cheap labour. He stays on after seeing an entire village of idiots who can be exploited there itself- the turbine generator has already been set up, factories powered by it would soon follow, and no prizes for guessing who'll be the cheap labour working in them.

"Kaveri Amma, at your age you should stay in, and tighten bolts on this assembly line for 12 hours everyday."

4. The white man is forever better than you, stupid Indian!
As if portraying Indians as the desi counterparts of Forrest Gump wasn't enough to rub in the point, Swades goes 1 step further just to make sure you get the message, because the movie is true to itself and thinks everything needs to be spelt out to a moron like you.

It's called Swades, and it's about us, THE PEOPLE, not the desi cows, or the desi kutta, but you and me, WE!

The closing scene shows SRK out-pehelwaaning the resident pehelwaan of the village. Let that sink in for a minute; a pencil-necked engineerwuss who sits on his computer all fucking day pitted against a desi pehelwaanfarmer who has been doing heavy manual labour in fields and pehelwaaning for years.

But to be fair, SRK did receive his pehelwaani certification from NASA.

Sure, you might chalk this up to SRK masturbating his own ego. After all, the guy defeated a sumo wrestler in one movie and single-handedly beat up the entire Punjabi and Tamilian communities in two others. But this is a context where a White proxy invites himself in and out-smarts Indians both intellectually and physically, including beating us at the one thing we are good at- grappling each other in our underwear. There couldn't be a possibly more blatant way of implying white supremacy, unless Father Evolution himself showed up and made our women reject our terribly inferior desi-quality genes for some sweet 'n' selective exotic breeding.

Oh wait, that happened too!

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Writer's Note- in case anyone noticed, yes it's been well over a month since the last post. It's hard to keep writing this kind of stuff at a constant frequency. So Stagg Mann is working on a comicstrip to fill in the timegap. No, not Alok Nath memes or stuff copy-pasted from 9gag, but an actual comicstrip, or at least, an attempt at it. Don't expect Jack Kirby-level stuff though, Stagg Mann's superdesignpowers begin and end with MS Paint.