Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.There is a scene in India\u2019s cinematic masterpiece Pather Panchali \u2014 or Song of the Little Road, the first film of \u201cThe Apu Trilogy\u201d by Satyajit Ray \u2014 in which the child protagonist Apu is crouched in a sugar cane field watching a train rumble past. It is a metaphor of the promise of development in a country that was breathing fresh the air of independence from Britain in 1947.The trilogy, originally released in the 1950s, may seem detached from today\u2019s India \u2014 now the world\u2019s fifth-largest economy and home to some of Asia\u2019s richest billionaires. But to many young Indians the film has come as something of an awakening. Last month, the restored films, which were damaged in a London fire in 1993, were re-released in a Lutyens\u2019 Delhi cinema. At the end of the trilogy\u2019s first screening there was silence, then sighs, then applause capped by emotional tears.India has \u201cemerged as one of the fastest-growing large economies in the world\u201d, reads the latest World Bank report. Over the past two decades the economy grew four times in size, helping to lift 106mn people out of poverty, mainly in rural areas, between 2011 and 2021. Yet the shine is coming off amid a slowdown that \u201cindicates challenges\u201d, the bank says, as India aspires to become a high-income economy by the centenary of its independence. This brings the relevance of Apu \u2014 and the ghosts of a \u201cpoor India\u201d \u2014 back to life in a country where swaths of the population still live hand-to-mouth.Pather Panchali, which was inspired by the Italian neorealism of Vittorio De Sica\u2019s Ladri di Biciclette, captures the unfiltered daily life of a poor family in rural Bengal, a reality that continues for many in some of parts of India. \u201cPather Panchali is a cautionary tale,\u201d said\u00a0Pronab Sen, an economist from Bengal and former principal economic adviser to India\u2019s planning commission.While praised for its honesty, the film also faced politicised criticism when it was made. In his memoir,\u00a0My Years with Apu, Ray said he heard ministers had \u201ctaken objection to the film\u201d simply \u201cfor being so true a picture of unadulterated poverty\u201d. For years, the legendary filmmaker faced attacks from those who accused him of \u201cexporting poverty\u201d. Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, an award-winning filmmaker and archivist who heads the Film Heritage Foundation that preserves India\u2019s films, told me that when the film was first released there was uproar.\u00a0\u201cBut since then, we as Indians do realise that it is one of the greatest films ever made and it is still relevant because it is a film about the reality of where India emerges from.\u201d Apu\u2019s return to India was applauded in New Delhi. There are plans to take it to Kolkata, Ray\u2019s birthplace. This time there has been no public outcry about showcasing poverty. Surjit Bhalla, an Indian economist \u2014 and fan of Ray \u2014 who served as executive director for India at the IMF, told me that although measurement of poverty in India has always been a contentious issue, \u201cat the time of the first release\u201d of Pather Panchali, India\u2019s GDP per head was around $80. Last year, it topped almost $3,000.Bhalla co-authored a paper last month stating that India has already eliminated the most extreme forms of poverty. Only 1 per cent of households fell below the international poverty line of $2.15 a day in 2024. But while India has made massive economic progress transitioning from a low-income to a middle-income country, it still had 234mn people living in poverty, according to the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index by Oxford university and the UN, as of last year. This makes it the country with the world\u2019s largest number of people living with deprivations. As national affluence grows, many Indians have become too accustomed to the bling and glitz of recent Bollywood movies. So screening Apu is \u201cvery important\u201d to open the eyes of younger\u00a0generations to poverty, Vasundhara Bhattacharya, a teary-eyed 21-year-old biology student, told me after the film\u2019s ending to a background tune by sitarist Ravi Shankar. The Apu films, he said, are as \u201crelevant as they are timeless\u201d.andres.schipani@ft.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.There is a scene in India\u2019s cinematic masterpiece Pather Panchali \u2014 or Song of the Little Road, the first film of \u201cThe Apu Trilogy\u201d by Satyajit<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":278402,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-278401","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278401"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":278403,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278401\/revisions\/278403"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}