Delhi Belly: A love letter to the modern Indian male

The first glimpse we get of the valiant heroes of Delhi Belly is uninspiring, to say the least. The camera offers a peek of Kunal Roy Kapoor’s hairy bum, and then pans away to capture other equally unappetising details: ant-infested beds, plates of rotting food, giant cockroaches roaming at will. Yet the scene is less urban penury than masculine squalor. These are guys being guys, careless of hygiene, shirking domestic duty, too lazy to get up to fill water or answer the door. Behold the Indian slacker! Delhi Belly’s plot and cinematic style are inspired by the expected Hollywood sources: Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction; Guy Ritchie’s Snatch; and given its preoccupation with shit, perhaps even Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting. Less obvious is the movie’s debt to the “slacker bromances” such as 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and The Hangover that celebrate boys being boys. In Hollywood, the slacker genre ushered in a refreshing kind of anti-hero, an endearing, intelligent goof, less interested in being a man than remaining a boy. These are ambition-free guys who essentially love to hang out doing nothing – preferably with their bros. They are educated but usually under-employed at a dead-end job. Careers, marriage, babies – anything that connotes responsibility or adulthood – is a giant drag. [caption id=“attachment_36826” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“The heroes of Delhi Belly are not ‘winners’ in any Indian sense of the word. They don’t possess the degree – no 3 Idiotshere – or the pedigree required to aim for the top of the pile. Image in.com”]  [/caption] Over the years, both the genre and the character have evolved, revealing some glaring flaws. As Knocked Up star Katherine Heigl put it, “[I]t paints the women as shrews, as humourless and uptight, and it paints the men as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys.” They exist primarily as cinematic props created to nag the male characters into adulthood. And over time, the slackers have gone from lovable layabouts to lewd, crude lads, regressing from immature to just juvenile – a trend most recently evidenced in the egregious Hangover 2. A good time then for our Made-in-India slackers to make their debut. Tashi, Arup and Nitin are hardly the first of their kind to grace the Bollywood screen. From Raj Kapoor’s tramp persona through Amol Palekar’s middle-class bumbler to the villager-bums in Peepli Live, there have been plenty of underachievers for us to root for. But what makes the Delhi Belly guys special is that they are smarter, sharper, and more self-aware than the rest. This Indian hero displays neither the dweeby self-effacement of his native predecessors or the whiny self-pity of his American peers. Director Abhinay Deo takes the standard tropes of the slacker – crappy jobs, slob-like lifestyles, and bro bonding – and creates a modern Indian male who is all grown up. The heroes of Delhi Belly are not ‘winners’ in any Indian sense of the word. They don’t possess the degree – no 3 Idiots here – or the pedigree required to aim for the top of the pile. But they are not sweet-natured losers who accept their lot. Nor do they willfully disdain having a career like the quintessential American slacker. These guys are well-educated and care about their work, whether it’s Tashi’s desire to do real journalism, Arup’s pride in his cartooning skills, or Nitin’s genuine affection for the camera. What they reject is a life devoted to moving up the social ladder. Tashi, for example, is wary and uncomfortable around his wealthy future in-laws, eager to coopt him into their lavish Delhi lifestyle. When Arup is dumped by his girl for an NRI engineer, there’s no doubt about who is losing out. For all the goofing around, these are young men making conscious choices about who they are, and what they want in life. Sweeter still is their relationship with women. There is none of the Western silliness of painting love and marriage as a trap. They don’t obsess about sex or treat it as a masculine achievement. This is perhaps the first lad-flick with little or no dirty talk about chicks or getting laid. Both Tashi and Arup seem genuinely fond of their girlfriends, ditsy or untrustworthy as they may be. And in matters of sex, these are modern, adult men who are willing to do their bit in the sack. “She has given me a blowjob. But, because I’m a 21st century guy and therefore I also gave her oral pleasure,” declares Arup in a fantasy wedding scene. The camera soon captures Tashi dutifully doing just that for girlfriend Sonia. This lack of machismo is all the more striking in the backdrop of Delhi’s uber-macho culture, epitomised by Menaka’s husband, a rich bully who asserts his manliness by picking a fight or brandishing a gun. Delhi Belly ushers in a new kind of hero who doesn’t need to prove his masculinity by getting rich, scoring with the girls, or beating up the next guy. He is neither the underdog seeking redemption nor the victorious alpha male. He is a man because he just is. And if that makes him a slacker, we can surely use more of his kind.