India Tomorrow, new short film by popular Bollywood director Imtiaz Ali questions stereotypical portrayals of sex workers in Bollywood films.
In the five-minute film, a sex worker ends up giving financial advise to her customer, a stock broker who gets a sudden phone call about his losses after an abrupt fall in the stock market. He then gets some unexpected but intelligent advice from the sex worker. When he asks her, how she's so knowledgeable about the stock market, she coolly replies. "Don't worry about me. I'll take care of myself."
In the process, it overturns several cinematic clichés about sex workers in Bollywood, whose portrayal has been loaded with moralistic and melodramatic stereotypes about everything from dressing to mannerisms, their ideas of love, marriage and fate.
"It's core argument is that in #IndiaTomorrow, anyone can bring change and achieve success," a note accompanying the film states.