Word: phoolan
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There are a few exceptions. John McCain has a story. But even McCain's record of war and imprisonment pales beside the story of Phoolan Devi - India's Bandit Queen and Member of Parliament from Uttar Pradesh, assassinated the other day outside her home in New Delhi...
...Despite the national outrage and anguish - parliament suspended its proceedings, and even long-time foes lamented the failure of India's security services to properly protect a duly elected national legislator - Phoolan Devi would have lived much of her life expecting a violent death...
...Phoolan Devi's life, as dramatized in the movie "The Bandit Queen," was an extraordinarily violent Indian Cinderella story. But when the laws of probability finally caught up with Devi outside her New Delhi home on Tuesday, its fairytale ending was rewritten. The film helped propel the brutalized teenager-turned-brutal avenger into parliament as a champion of India's marginalized "untouchable" caste. But the real life "Bandit Queen" died Tuesday in a hail of bullets fired by unknown assassins...
...According to the legend of Phoolan Devi in the villages of northern India, her lover and Dacoit mentor Vikram Mallah had taught her, "If you are going to kill, kill twenty, not just one. For if you kill twenty, your fame will spread; if you kill only one, they will hang you as a murderess." The Bandit Queen?s story certainly bore out that maxim. But the maxim has a corollary: The more people you kill; the wider the clamor for revenge...
...Natural Born Killers meets Heaven and Earth. Most Indian movies are either humid musical fables or languid art films in the Satyajit Ray mold. Bandit Queen is neither. It is an assaultive experience, blistering with ripe obscenities, the frontal nudity of its star and three stark scenes in which Phoolan is raped--enough to have the film banned 10 times over in a country where a bare shoulder can send the censors frothing...