Quotes of the Day
Movies can be a powerful tool to expose ignorance and prejudice about AIDS. In 1993, American superstar Tom Hanks won an Oscar for his moving portrayal of a gay lawyer dying of AIDS in the hit film Philadelphia. It helped bring the deadly disease out of the closet, and removed some of the stigma attached to actors playing AIDS victims. Now, a new AIDS drama has premiered. It's modest, not destined for the big screen, and is produced by Bollywood, not Hollywood. But among its target audience of South Asians in Britain, it's breaking social taboos.
The force behind Ek Pal (Hindi for One Moment) is Karamjeet Ballagan, a 41-year-old ethnic Indian health worker in Birmingham, home to a big South Asian population. When Ballagan alerted community leaders that the HIV rate—though still small—was rising among South Asians and that people needed to be educated about sex and drugs, she ran into a wall of opposition. Culturally conservative and religiously orthodox, they refused to acknowledge the problem. "They thought I was imposing Western values and encouraging young people to have sex," says Ballagan. "But I wanted them to face reality."
Ballagan felt that a Bollywood film would be the most effective way to air the subject of sexual health. So she pried $30,000 out of the National Health Service, convinced a prominent Birmingham writer, Rod Dungate, to develop a script, and flew to Bombay. There she roped in producer and director Gautam Verma, known for not shying away from controversial topics. He, in turn, persuaded several top soap stars to take part. "You could see a bit of fear on their faces," recalls Ballagan. "They were wondering if they would ruin their reputations acting in an AIDS movie."
They needn't have fretted. At initial screenings, the 40-minute Ek Pal has earned a warm response. The typically melodramatic Bollywood plot has Sanjay, a respectable, married businessman, contracting HIV from a casual sexual encounter. Filled with guilt, he deserts his family, avoids telling his mistress, Komal (who is carrying his child), and is ostracized by the community. When Komal later learns what has happened, she kills herself out of shame and fear that she and her unborn baby may also be infected. But this being Bollywood, despite the tragedies set in motion by Sanjay's "one moment" of weakness, the story concludes with all remaining parties reconciled. Ballagan herself couldn't have wished for a happier ending.
- Maryann Bird/London
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