FilmIndia (1948)

hrch, 1948 FILM INDIA ;?n if they want to impose a star on us. let them pose someone better than Margaret Lockwood. You j", we are rather particular in our tastes. t PAYS TO BE POLITE Among the ill-mannered, ill-tempered, uncouth id unseemly men we come across in the daily roujje of life the Indian picture house employees are, fhaps, the worst specimens in so -far as their betviour towards the picturegoers is concerned. From ;> manager down to the lowest menial working in |; cloak rooms one hardly ever meets a polite peril in this profession. i Good manners and polite habits have never been ■isidered essential qualifications for any public or ini-publie service in this half-starved, half clad lintry seething with masses of poor, illiterate and Jiorant people. Our public servants, for instance, are notorious I their bad manners and short tempers. Be it the :rk in the secretariat or any other government or inicipal office; be it the railway servant of any pcription from the station master to the ticket i lector; be it a postal, telegraphic or telephone aployee; the tram or bus conductor or inspector; i is generally the same in his manners and behaijiur to all ordinary members of the public whose .ivant he is supposed to be and for serving whom lis paid his wages. When these are the human species we meet j.ong the comparatively educated and better paid J of people in public and semi-public services, it mot at all surprising to find that the picture house jployees, who are deliberately chosen from among t least educated people, whose physical fitness jints as a greater qualification than cultural cquipint and who are, as a rule, underpaid and over<rked besides, one should rarely ever expect to ne across a decent chap with a smile on his face i a good word or a polite gesture for the patrons of i employers. The Indian exhibitor, whose entire attention is icentrated on the illegitimate earnings of his ck market business, has never yet found it necesy to realize that it pays to be polite to his pans. He is in no need of patrons paying only the lal admission fee for he knows thai there arc DUgh producers and distributors who would pay Q many times more and he is often bi tter benefitby showing his picture to as few spectators as •sible. As he does not care for the spectators who, his mind are mere so many fools wasting their ie and money he never wants his subordinates or ployees to behave at all — leave aside behaving ely. And those employees, picked up mostly from the er ranks of society, think they are so many bosses o can treat the picturegoers with all the insult, leness and arrogance they can command. And so from the watchman at the main entrance to the manager behind the box offices every one these big bosses thinks as if the people coming to their cinema were so many famine-stricken paupers coming to collect their daily dole of food rations. The higher the official the greater must be his arrogance. They can all jostle and push the audiences as they like; they can insult them with foul tongues — often even abusive and obscene; they can refuse to sell them tickets even with hundreds of seats lying vacant; they can refuse them admission, deprive them of their reserved accommodation and harass them in a thousand and one other ways. And the most surprising part of the whole show is that a big majority of the picturegoing public who actually pays and is, therefore, entitled to all the accommodation and courtesy that the ticket can buy, silently submits to all such insults, humiliation and ill treatment. The state of things will never improve until the public demands an improvement and it is time now that it did. We feel ashamed of those citizens who put up with the treatment meted out to them by the owners and employees of Indian picturehouses. We want some of them who have not entirely lost self-respect to protest against it and start a regular campaign for compelling better manners and requisite politeness from the entire picture house staff which can be effected only by the complete substitution of educated and better paid theatre employees in place of the present lot which should be forthwith dispensed with. Jaimala is not quite happy with the contents of the letter she is holding in Bhooniraddi Productions' picture "Mandir" 15