‘You stupid wogs should stick to donkeys!’ This is racism because the old lady is assuming that back in India, everyone rides donkeys round which is not true and is just a comment which she thinks is appropriate. Also by calling them wogs she thinks that she is being clever but infact they are Indians and to compare them to a black toy is rather arrogant and stupid and has no point or meaning what so ever.
As Meena starts to hang about with Anita they become best friends. IN the film there is a theme of mystery because in a nearby felid there is believed that a yeti lives in there. The two girls decide to be brave and go into where the yeti is supposed to live and build a camp/den for themselves. This mystery is explored the whole way through the film in different occasions. Some of these include when Meena is not allowed to see Anita and she contacts the yeti using light signals with her torch form her bedroom window. At another point in the film Meena feels alone and depressed and quotes
‘Even the yeti has abandoned me’. This is because when she used to do the light signals she used to see him but now he has disappeared.
IN the midst of all her happiness, Meena is getting a lot of pressure in her domestic life because her parents expect the best of her and that’s not what she wants to giver because she wants to be a writer, not a doctor or anything else that her parents pressure her to be. She is also getting the added pressure of her exams (SATs) coming up and also when her family come round for the day they are very disappointed that she cannot speak Punjab. She resolves this by just making up a tune from a pop song but this still plays on her mind even when her grandmother from India comes to visit. This pressure then turns into dis- obedience because Meena starts to rebel. Her parents cannot see that it is their fault and blame Meena rebellience on Anita. This then leads to Meena parents banning her from seeing Anita. This then causes even more problems.
The fact that Anita is now not allowed seeing Meena means that she ends up going off the rails and becoming not a very good person. Both Anita and Meena miss each other. It gets to the point when Anita’s mother has to very bravely face Meena mother to confront her about the fact that she has stop Meena from seeing Anita. Meena mother then panics and says that Anita is welcome anytime and so therefore they are allowed to see each other again. This may not have been such a wise idea because then all the bad tricks that Anita had picked up were now being passed onto Meena. When means Auntie Shelia (Meera Syal) and uncle come to stay with their twin daughters, pinkie and baby, things just go form bad to worse. Anita and Meena decide to steel from the local shop by using pinkie and baby as excuses. When they enter the shop the shop keeper (despite being extremely racist) is always very pleasant to Meena and shows her, her daughters postcards because her daughter travels the world and sends postcards back to tell and show her family where she is. Whilst she is out the back, Meena grabs a pot of money which a collection for the mending of the church roof (formally for African babies but being racist, the shopkeeper did not agree and so changed the fund) and shoved it down one of the twins tops and made them walk out with it. All of the parents then get called into the shop. Meena mother and the twins mother have been friends since they were little girls and this is the first ever fight they have had. The twins eventually get the blame and because of this the two best friends do not talk anymore. This is a theme of family rows and friendship. Despite everything they have been through in life the two friends end up at logger heads with each other over a religious issue. In the Hindu religion they believe that steeling is wrong and that god will punish them. This explores the idea of family rows and teaches us that we should always find out the real facts before taking drastic actions as shown here.
I mentioned earlier that Meena was obsessed with writing and aspired to be a writer one day. She would always write articles to read out to the class and although she knew in herself that they ere very good, she never got told by the teacher that they were good, the teacher just used to say ‘thank you Meena’ and Meena used to sit down without any compliment made to her articles. One day Meena confronted her teacher and asked her why she never says well done. The teacher then feels pressured but eventually comes round and congratulates Meena on her article and Meena even gets a smile from her teacher! This is exploring the theme of racism also but in a different way because although the shop keeper should be civil to all customers, a teacher has more of a responsibility to treat all of the children in her class as equals and with the same amount of respect for each pupil. Nowadays if this was to happen then the teacher could be prosecuted by the police but although the film was only filmed a few years ago, it was set in the 70’s when the country was very much a racist country and no action could be taken by the police because most of the police were racist themselves.
During the film there is a whole different storyline going on about a new motorway being built, linking the village straight to the city on one main motorway? Despite the many protests against it, the motorway went ahead. One of the engineers that were working on the motorways was friends with Meena parents. Meena mother had known him for along time. During the periods when Anita and Meena were not allowed to talk, Anita starting hanging about with a boy called Sam. Once Anita and Meena were friends again Anita told Meena a secret that Meena wished that she never had heard. Meena parents found out that the engineer had been beaten to death in tolllington (where they live) by a group of thugs. This left Meena mother distort and angry. Meena heard crashing and banging and heard her mother tearing the house apart because she was so upset and grieving for her friend. Meena then heard her mothers Tories of how is was in India and how is it now. This shows the theme of different cultures and finding it hard to adjust to different cultures. Meena mother had never show this before but I guess that the event of losing her friend to English yobs made her just lose it and let it all out about what she thinks about the country and that if they were back in Indian then it would not have happened. The secret that Anita then told Meena was that the yobs that actually killed him were a yob. It was Sam. Anita then made the statement ‘I only held his chips’. Anita didn’t know that the man was Meena mother’s friend but Meena knew exsactly who Anita was talking about. This then made Meena angry. IM not sure weather it was teenage hormones or just plain aggression towards Anita kicked in. Meena jumped up onto a horse and rode it into Anita in a stage of violence. She unfortunately missed Anita but fell off and badly sprained her ankle. As this theme explores racism on sam's behalf because he most likely never would have done this to a white man, it also explores the themes of murder and coping with death. The coping with death was not handled very well as we can see from Meena mothers reaction. Betrayal is also shown because although Anita insists she only held the chips she was still there which concludes that she was involved and she of anyone should not be racist because her best friend was of the same origin as the engineer.
The final theme which I think was explored in the film is a religious theme that all religions disagree with. This is underage sex. In the film this is shown when Anita’s little sister thinks that Anita is being killed and so goes to get Meena to help. When they turn up they see Anita lying down and Sam just was standing up. They then hear the sound of sam’s zip do up. This is what indicates that they have been having underage sex. Anita is not pleased to see her sister and especially Meena after what she tried but didn’t succeed in doing to her with the horse. Underage sex in overseen as an orally wrong thing to do if you are religious or not. Many people who follow agnosticism or atheism would also agree that underage sex is morally wrong so this therefore proves that it is not just a religious problem but a general overview of many peoples opinion.
I am now going to tell you which I think are the most important theme which was displayed during the film. This, in my opinion was the theme of the split between religions. Throughout the duration of the film the overall message is that the reason that Meena has so many problems is because of one, her skin colour and two, her religion which also links to her skin colour. Everything that happens in the film ahs some relation to Meena religion or faith.
I think that the film portrays the situation and mood of the film very well. It gets across the message but without being too full on. BY this I mean that the comedy side of the film is still there which makes the film more enjoyable and takes the attention away form the initial message so that the audience can watch the film without always being drawn to the political side of it.
I think that the film teaches us that we should not judge a book by its cover. Being s the main theme of the film is religion and faith splits in society, I thin that the film teaches us that we should treat others with the respect that deserve to get, no matter what their religion or faith or skin colour or hair colour, for that matter, may be. My personal reaction to the film was that it taught me a lesson in how I should respect each and every other human being despite what they have done because one day it might just come back on me. The film raised questions for me such as, why only 30 years ago was England such a racist country but now there are so many foreigners in this country that people see other ethnic origins as apart of our society?
IN conclusion I think that the film of Anita and me gets across a valuable message that I think everyone in today’s society could benefit from learning because in relation to the society of London today, there are many different ethnic religions living in the city and we must learn to respect all the other religions if we want respect form them back.
