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Things didn’t go so well when the media mogul was in India a few months back taping the show, and now that it’s aired, she reportedly has the entire South Asian country up in arms.
[READ: Oprah's Bodyguards Arrested in India - PHOTOS]
The people of India are offended at how Miss O. portrayed the country and it’s residents on the show:
The smell of incense (tick), the sari fitting (tick), the aspirations of slum dwellers (tick), and the glitz of Bollywood (tick). Let’s not forget arranged marriages and the fact that Indians, even rich ones, “still” eat with their hands (tick, tick).
India as Westerners imagine it, one stereotype at a time.
Not good… not good at all!
Details below…According to Bossip:
Oprah is really striking out with the brown folk… First she lost her black audience when she started catering to the white stay at home moms and now the Indian ladies are pissed she’s acting too good to eat with her hands!
The show aired this past weekend and many in India responded to the two India-focused episodes with shock & awe.
The Wall Street Journal in India reports that Oprah got thumbs down across the board for her portrayal of the country, referring to the show as “Oprah’s slum tour”.
In India, the people she interacted with ranged from a family of five living in a 10-foot-by-10-foot room in a Mumbai slum, to Bollywood aristocracy, Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan.
While her show mainly targets a mainstream American audience, many criticized Ms. Winfrey for choosing to project such a caricaturized image of India to the world.
“The avg American thinking of India as a place with snake charmers and elephants as main mode of transport, I can understand. But Oprah???” said user Nandita Iyer on Twitter.
“Honestly, this Oprah winfrey has made such a royal fool of herself with this,” she added.
“An unflattering, outmoded, selective and clichéd representation” of India, is how one commentator, Gargi Gupta, described the first episode of the television show.
Camera shots of “roadside cows chomping on garbage and roads choked with traffic,” are just some aspects of the show that Ms. Gupta said may make Indian viewers “groan.”
The show wasn’t a complete write-off for Ms. Gupta, however. She found Ms. Winfrey’s approach tactful when she asked slum dwellers about their hopes and fears. “It suggests a respect for human sensitivities that television anchors in India… would do well to learn,” she writes in a piece published in the Business Standard.
Not all were so kind.
For Rajyasree Sen, the show didn’t have a single redeeming feature.
“Myopic, unaware, ignorant and gauche. This was Middle America at its best worst,” wrote Ms. Sen of the show’s first episode in a column on Firstpost.
She found Ms. Winfrey’s comment on Indians still eating with their hands particularly offensive. “I don’t know what people in America are eating their hot dogs, pizzas and tacos with but perhaps Oprah’s home has evolved cutlery for all that,” she writes.
Many on Twitter agreed. “You still eat with your hands? – The shocking arrogance of a clueless rich woman,” wrote Aseem Chhabra.
I didn’t catch the episode but I don’t think Queen O would intentionally stereotype an entire culture. She may be rich as hell but she’s still a Black woman and Lord knows in today’s age of Reality Show coonery, us Black women are the biggest victims of cultural stereotypes today.
But I digress…
Do you think Oprah was out of line? Were you offended by the show?
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I saw the show and it wasn’t that bad, its the ones who think they are a country like England who are mad, and, when she got into the whole color thing, that was the turning point that they didn’t want the world to know about, just saying….
India needs to be offended marrying children at the age of 10 & 11..little girls & boys having babies at the age of 13-14 & expected to have a bunch more before they are even out of their teens…no educating..living in villages..populating & being fruitful & have no way of really taking care of these families they are creating…# Sunday’s L.A. Times front page…
I think her show was taken out of context. She showed the great parts of India and the less desirable parts to give an balanced depiction of the country and its people. Did they want her to only film in the big city where Mr. Patel and his family are answering phones and helping Americans their with internet problems?? I personally believe the images of Africa we see on television only shows people living in huts and women walking around naked with plates in their mouths, when there are so many industrial areas and a huge working class that live in nice homes and drive nice cars but all we see are Feed the Children commercials smh.
"populating & being fruitful & have no way of really taking care of these families they are creating…"
I think the same thing could be said of some people here in our country.
very well said.
Ain’t nobody tell her to take her ass over there #smh
Truth hurts…..
So true ! i have been to India on couple of occasion and the show portrayed the truth if not less!!!
They need to be offended at their caste system and they too have internal racism. How many dark skinned Indians do you see in Bollywood? Right…shut the hell up. Don’t have a cow! Yes…pun was intended.
I don’t feel that she mentioned all of those things for them to come off in a negative way but the truth is the truth. You wouldn’t want her to tell a lie to cover up what the REAL deal is in India. What if I or someone else is thinking about visiting or relocating there. I would want to know what really goes on.
I’ve been to India — was in Bangalore for 6 weeks. Sorry, but Oprah was right on the money. There’s an overall sentiment there that is very primitive. Yes, there are cows on the side of the road eating garbage. Hell, cows are in the middle of the ‘street’ during rush hour holding up traffic! There is very little infrastructure, and a lot of people didn’t even have phone lines in their own homes.
At the building I worked at, they had to put signs up in the ladies room to remind the female to ‘utilize the flush’. Lawd!
As someone said above — truth hurts….
I saw the show and I saw no reason for offense. I don’t think she said anything in a negative way, besides they still do all the things she said. Arrange marriages, mother-in-law moves into the house and she is really the person in charge, yes they do eat with their fingers ( I am from West Africa and yes many people still do that too) and NO everyone doesn’t know how to it. Eating a hotdog or pizza is totally different from eating rice and meat with your fingers. So the cow or donkey or whatever was eating trash on the side of the road, well if it’s true why the offense? There was so much to learn from the airing of those shows, but just like anything if you focus on the negative then that’s what stands out! You mean to tell me they couldn’t focus on the beauty of the respect shown in the families and their culture? Oh well you can’t please everyone.
Yeah they need to be offended by how they treat women, widows, orphans, etc. Her intent was not to offend, so they all need to have a seat.
Ok , were the families fictional? If she went from poor to rich that means everyone had a chance to redeem and show different.
dead @ evolved cutlery! Sooo what else does India have to offer except for the person that keeps me on hold to ask his supervisor a simple ass response to How they’re doing.
I think she showed both sides of the coin regarding India and they didn’t like what it represented. I have never been there but my coworker was there shooting a documentary and said she saw people defecating in the streets in the slums. The public bathrooms in the slums are basically a bench with holes in it that you do your business right next to the other person. They still have a caste system in place. Your child can’t go to school with other children of a different caste so you can never rise above your station. Many of the women sell their bodies to live or work extremely long days or work for days at a time in a factory. They sleep at their work station or on the floor. Some are raped by their boss or give in willing to sex because they need the job.
Oprah is and always WILL be the optimum reporter. It is not her job or purpose to biasely filter the truth. Should she have pretended the cows and chickens WEREN’T roaming around eating trash? They should be so lucky that she didn’t reveal the TRUTH about their "caste" society with their color codes embedded in their culture from British rule just as it is from slavery with our Blacks within the U.S. I for one was wondering how she would be received. Oprah’s $$$ and status walk before her in countries like that. India places wealth,even among their poorest commoners, before anything else. But they look down on African and dark skinned people. Oprah, being a brown skinned woman of African descent would ordinarily be scorned with no choices in life other than trash sorting, maids and cleaning their rudimentary sewage system which equals holes in the ground here and there along the streets. IJS.
…And the THOUGHT of eating with your hands after squatting over someone else’s waste in an open hole on the street, not to mention the flies and the question of how and when did you clean your hands! That sari can only tolerate so much before it smells in that smoldering cow dung heat. And even IT is washed in contaminated water. I just hope my Oprah was sanitized and decompressed after leaving that idol worshiping hell hole.
I saw the show and no i do not think O was out of line. the host at the rich home told her it was customary for them to eat with their hands as they were all doing. he showed her the polite way to eat with only one hand in a scooping kind of fashion and she couldn’t quite grasp it. so she told him if he didn’t mind she would eat with both bc if she didn’t she would take too long to finish her meal. these complainers are just salty bc oprah showcased india’s "ugly" side — the gross poverty — which they like most civilized people prefer to keep hidden. i like that she showed all levels of society and attempted to deal with interesting topics like — the various roles of women.
Sit down Oprah! I thought she had retired.She is EVERYWHERE!!! Take a nap.DANG!!!!
She bought it?
FOH, the country is still using caste(class system)and poverty is rampant. They acting like the country don’t do arranged marriages, beating of women for whatever reason
the above comments seem to be made by white middle aged suburban women in America who have never been to India. Yes, there is poverty, caste system, and poor infrastructure in many parts of the country. However, it is also a country of 1.3 billion people, a nation that only received its independence 60 years ago, and still it is beginning to thrive economically, has great engineers, scientists , computer engineers. There is a lot of importance on family relationship and caring for the elderly. The country has given birth to great religions such as: Buddhism Hinduism,Sikhism, and Jainism, not to mention systems of yoga and ayurvedic healing. Also, snake charmers do not even account for 1/10 of a percent of the country, and people do not use elephants or camels as their mode of transportation.
Oprah should look at the slums of Chicago, high teen pregnancy, multiple baby- daddies for little kids, high crime rate.. this is what is upsetting Indians.