CORRUPTION PLOTS
The Ethics of Space in the Millennial City
RAEES
Raees is a 2017 Bollywood film starring Sharukh Khan as the titular hero. The film profiles the life of a small-time liquor smuggler, Raees, who lives a glorified life of dhanda, a Hindi word for "business," but its cultural connotation implies "the hustle." Raees embodies post-colonial ethics, living by the philosophy (quoted below) that “no business/hustle is too insignificant and no religion is greater than business/hustle” as long as that business does not cause harm. Raees’s antithesis is an ethical cop who tells him: “What you call business is actually crime. Stop your business or else you will find it difficult to breathe.”
At one point in the film, a significant turn of events concerns a 200-acre plot of peripheral urban land. Raees is offered a lucrative real estate opportunity by a rapacious developer in cahoots with a corrupt politician. The developer attends an event Raees hosts and tells him: "The chief minister has given me the property to develop. But the hitch is that it is occupied—encroachers you know, and he wants your [Raees’] company to get the place vacated." Raees smells an unethical scam here and schemes his own, more ethical (in his mind), scam: he turns the land into question into an affordable housing development for the very people he was called on to evict. Called Apnee Duniya [Our World], the housing development promises poor people a home, a place to call their own.
Soon after construction starts, however, the politician takes revenge on Raees’ lack of loyalty and rezones that land into a "green zone," thus criminalizing Raees’ Our World development overnight (the pinpointing of blame shifts overnight). Unlike the story of Forest Beckoning, in which a developer encroaches into a fixed green belt given on a city plan, here the green belt is itself is a fiction, a moving frontier used opportunistically and selectively to criminalize real estate projects of the enemy. Here, the green zone itself is a corrupt plot fiction, a moving frontier used opportunistically and selectively to condone and criminalize real estate projects.