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DOLLAR DREAMS
East or West, India is the best!
Sekhar Kammula follows in the footsteps of fellow Hyderabadi Nagesh Kukunoor
(of Hyderabad Blues fame) to write, direct and produce Dollar Dreams,
which tackles the dilemma of the youth today - to make it big in the US,
the land of opportunities, or be a patriot and slog it out in India...
Dollar Dreams revolves around six youngsters in Hyderabad trying to make
their choices, whether to take the obvious route of boarding the flight
to the US, or do something in their motherland, India.
The main characters in the film - Ravi, Balu, Phani, Srinu, Sardar and
Usha, who have grown up together as a gang in Hyderabad, have this varying
degrees of ‘Go US’ urge. Ravi makes it to the States and decides
to stay there, while Sardar, who looks after family business, is untouched
by the US hype. Balu, a Commerce graduate, uses all types of methods,
including fraud, to get to the US. Phani, who is happy with his job, compares
himself to his mediocre friends, who have made it big in the US, and follows
in their footsteps alongwith wife Archana. Srinu spends most of his time
away from home to avoid his nagging father, who wants him to go to abroad.
Usha is a journalism student, doing a project on the craze among youth
to migrate to the US, and discovers numerous reasons for going abroad.
Writer-producer-director Sekhar Kammula wanted to make a film on his own
terms, which would be fresh and also have a purpose. “This film is
inspired by my own experience, and by the fact that 66% of the people
who move to the US annually, belong to Andhra Pradesh,” says Kammula.
Having lived in Hyderabad and having worked in the IT industry, Kammula
felt a strong sense of indifference and detachment in most of the intelligentsia
towards India and the life here. “It came as a shock to me, seeing
people’s fascination with leaving the country. US seems to be the
buzzword. Every family I visited, every man I met and every woman I spoke
to, was living here to leave Hyderabad, they were nurturing their children
to leave the country. Forget pride, people did not seem to have even a
minimum level of courtesy towards their motherland,” the writer-director
opines.
Kammula agrees that there are flaws in the Indian system, that there is
frustration, dearth of opportunities, insecurity, lethargy, pollution,
and the biggest flaw, corruption. And that he couldn’t expect people
to love this country and die a struggling martyr inspite of all this.
At the same time, Kammula didn’t want to support the idea of people
leaving, and he reveals he was in a dilemma as to what stand to take in
his film.
Amidst the confusion, it occurred to the director that even if people
left India because of lack of opportunities and migrated to US, they could
always come back to do their bit for their motherland. But again there
was a flipside to this thought - most of his friends who had returned
to India for a visit, opined that they had ‘grown’ so much in
the US, that they found it difficult to adjust here. The question that
now popped into Kammula’s mind was - what is growth, and shouldn’t
growth be one’s ability to cope with adversities and understand people
better? With this question he found the focus of his film.
The other angles the director thought of focussing on was - if his friends
were well-settled in India, why would they leave the country in the first
place? And do people realise how difficult it is to make the return journey
from US? “I had to show this to people and also the peer pressure,”
informs Kammula, “They see their friends leaving every other day,
they see them off at the airport, go back again to receive them. Friends
come back rich, changed, and some with a tremendous attitude. Then I had
to show naive parents, who don’t realise how far they are sending
their children and how tough it is to have them back. Also, I had to show
the audience the way software business is booming in Hyderabad. And I
had to show my beloved Hyderabad at its best. And above all, make the
audience smile.” Kammula, who is a graduate from the Osmania University
in Mechanical Engineering, completed his masters degree in Computer Science
in the U.S. After having worked in the IT industry for three years, he
joined a film school and finished M.F.A. (Film) degree, at Howard University.
During this time, he worked on a number of films (short and feature length)
in Hollywood, in various capacities, as production assistant and assistant
director. With all this experience, one can be sure that Kammula has been
able to convey his message successfully.
Salma Khatib
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