I've been trying very hard to rise above these things, but I'm only human. So naturally, I gasped in dismay or horror or pity or perhaps just acute embarrassment, when I saw a picture of Sonam Kapoor at Cannes in a startling, unsuccessfully experimental sari, her grandmother's full-sleeved blouse and also, it seemed, her grandmother's hairdo. Then I couldn't quite remember why she was there in the first place.
I've been trying very hard to rise above these things, but I'm only human. So naturally, I gasped in dismay or horror or pity or perhaps just acute embarrassment, when I saw a picture of Sonam Kapoor at Cannes in a startling, unsuccessfully experimental sari, her grandmother's full-sleeved blouse and also, it seemed, her grandmother's hairdo. Then I couldn't quite remember why she was there in the first place. Or Saif Ali Khan. Or Aishwarya Rai? Or for that matter Mallika Sherawat, looking increasingly cadaverous? 
Illustration/ Jishudev Malakar
People in the Hindi film industry, from the much-deified Nargis on, have scoffed at art cinema. If I'm not mistaken, that's what film festivals are mostly about, although, increasingly they are about business too. So then why are they so excited about playing festival-festival, about doing the Cannes-Cannes? Shouldn't they just be happy playing to us normal people in the gallery? Or aren't we good enough for them, after all, then?
Producers and producing companies are there for the business part and you can see the logic in that. The movie stars though, are there as 'ambassadors' not for cinema, but for various brands from L'Oreal to Chivas Regal. Well they have to earn their money -- but why do we treat this then, like it's some honour they've earned?
Yes, mainstream Indian cinemas have a language of their own. It's not necessary that we make films exactly in the way that the First World has decided works. Granted, we could try and educate other audiences about this unique Bollywoodesque sensibility. But for that, do Shekhar Kapur and Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra have to partner with (and we know what that means in Bollywood) Jeff Zimbalist to cut together a reported montage of film songs without context or name titles -- essentially a film version of the bad dresses and perplexing hairdos -- and call it a documentary?
These strange occurrences and sightings are continuing evidence that the more we speak about how our mainstream cinema is going international, the more it becomes insular and uninterested in anything but itself and all the uninteresting vanity that accompanies this.
All that seems to impress is what Punjabis effectively call sho-sha. The dress and the little Oscars-like-I-saw-on-TV walk. No self-reflection and epiphanies where someone (with money and power) comes back all excited about making good -- or even clever -- films. Shahrukh Khan tells the papers about how he met Martin Scorsese at a film festival who told him that we should restore and preserve our cinema prints, and with that cinema history. Gosh! Had that never occurred to him before? Anyway, he says, he's "going to" talk to other producers in the industry about this. Shahrukh, there is no truer fan of yours than I, and even I won't be holding my breath on that count.
In 1946, Chetan Anand's first film, Neecha Nagar, won the highest award at Cannes, and to date it remains the only Indian film to have done so. That was a film produced within the mainstream industry, by a filmmaker who also made films strongly meant for mainstream Indian audiences. Yes, it would be great if it happened more often. But really, in a world of so much film production, films getting into festivals is a chance thing, dependent on taste, opportunity, luck, connections and timing as much as excellence. It matters far more that we make those good films for ourselves and have an environment where we really respect an accomplishment for itself. And that's going to take something more than mimicking Western actresses on the red carpet and calling it prestige.
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Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at https://www.parodevi.com/.
The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.
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