Life between drama and reality

Rasha Almaqaleh 

A couple of years ago, my husband and I decided to spend our baby moon in India. The top factor which influenced our destination choice was Bollywood. We expected to see a place like the one we see in Bollywood movies, especially those scenes in which the movie star and his sweetheart all of a sudden start jumping, dancing and  singing in the arms of nature or in the middle of wonderful gardens. Everything around them is just charming!

This kind of scenes strongly clouded our judgment when we came to choose a destination for our first trip outside Yemen as a married couple and expecting parents. We chose India: the country where every house simply overlooks a marvelous garden, or that’s what we absurdly expected!

We arrived in Hyderabad international airport and left the airport in a Taxi. All the way to the hotel, we were just thunderstruck! The question that was spinning in my head as I saw smokes rising from straw huts on the way to the hotel : "Did I pass all those miles to find myself in Yemen again?! Those straw smoky huts reminded me of my hometown, Hudaida. It was a very similar scene that I used to see where I was born and raised, where people use smokes in a desperate attempt to keep the mosquitoes away.

A couple of days later, it became clear that India has a similar chaos to what we have in Yemen: crowded streets, free-roaming animals, beggars, etc. With the bedbugs in the hotel and the hundreds of cockroaches in the train, our earlier vision of a holiday in a paradise was rapidly evaporating.

After spending three weeks in India traveling from one city to another in pursuit of a make-you-dance place, we finally found it in Ramoji film city! It is a city where films are shot and that’s why it was like a heaven; green with empty clean streets just like what we watched in Indian movies.

After that trip to India, I became very careful in interpreting what I watch on TV and I figured a different way to analyze it. I have come to realize that drama doesn’t necessarily mirror real life. It is not always a reflection of what is going on in the society; rather it says loads about what is not! When drama focuses always on a specific element, that means it is missing in real life. That’s when writers and directors come to tickle viewer's imagination of the things that they hope to see in their daily life.

American drama is also another example of how reality separates from drama. We find that stories of horror, action and crime occupy a large area that one might think that the American society lives in constant thrill and every motel is certainly an ideal place for a real horror story!

Science fiction is also an accurate indicator of what is missing in a society. If you watch ‘Person of Interest’, which is a science fiction crime drama that takes place in New York City. The scenes of the TV series include a lot of violence; street fighting and heavy exchange of fire even in police stations. It also shows the police as unreliable corrupt force.

In reality, “the crime rate has fallen in New York City since the mid-1990s, and the violence rate is below average for large cities.” In addition, according to the Economist's 2015 ranking of 50 major cities in the world, New York ranked 10th the world's safest and the twenty-eighth most secure in terms of personal safety", as reported by Wikipedia!

This was really inspiring and made me wonder: what if we in Yemen wanted to make a science fiction movie or a series, what would be our ‘fiction’?  Our greatest fiction would be a world with reliable non-corrupt cops, where law enforcement existed along with clean and beautiful streets where people go to work and students to their schools without any fear of bombs or war planes! The climax of such science fiction story would be opening the tap and getting running water or going to the hospital and receiving decent medical care. 

Overall, if you watch an American movie that focuses on violence and crime, be sure that Americans have a quiet life or maybe a bit boring. And if you see Turks highlight in their drama love and affection, you should wonder whether they suffer from ‘emotional drought’ in their reality. And if you see a Yemeni film that focuses on a life with no power cuts, rest assured that the reality is about a society steeped in darkness!