MAJMA – Performance

Rahul Roy
India 2001 | 54 Min. | BetaSP, OmeU

What does ”being a man” mean in present-day India? A fast grow­ing nation that changes its appear­ance daily and chal­lenges its people to meet their ends. Here, sur­vival means: to adapt, to pull through and to fight for one’s iden­ti­ty. Majma takes a blunt look at how the per­cep­tion of male­ness has changed in Indian soci­ety and impres­sive­ly high­lights the lives of two Indian men whose attempts to comply with their per­cep­tion of man­li­ness could not be more dif­fer­ent: The first world describes a wrestling master with a tra­di­tion­al con­cep­tion of the male life and does not only fulfil the attrib­ut­es relat­ed to his notion but also con­sid­ers them to be nec­es­sary and cor­rect. In the other world the audi­ence meets a some­what melan­cholic char­ac­ter: a man in his mid-thir­ties who earns a living by ”sell­ing” his knowl­edge about male sex­u­al­i­ty on the market. Two sto­ries about the present-day male Indian and thus two con­cep­tions: one of tra­di­tion and one of confrontation.