Ganesh, Boy Wonder

"Ganesh, Boy Wonder" (or "Son of Elephant Man" --my title) by Srinivas Krishna, another Canadian-Indian filmmaker, is listed as a documentary (RT '71) but what we see in the film is so strange that it looks almost like a put-up job. In India Ganesh, the elephant god with the body of a human but the head and trunk of an elephant, is one of the most popular deities in the great Indian pantheon. In the Telugu-speaking south Indian city of Hyderabad a childless couple prays to Ganesh for a son and their prayers are answered -- in Spades! A boy arrives with a monstrous hump in the middle of his face where the nose is normally located, almost as big as the rest of his head. Ganesh --the boy wonder! Aside from this egregious deformity the boy seems to have a normal personality, even a sunny disposition, but something obviously needs to be done and the poor couple is not in a position to foot whatever massive bills would devolve from medical intervention. After much agonizing a surgical team from Canada headed by a Telugu speaking surgeon originally from that part of India, decide to take up this enormous medical challenge at no expense to the parents. After warning the parents that there might be side effects such as partial or complete blindness, the operation, performed in Hyderabad, is more or less successful, which is to say that most of the massive hump is removed and the boy's sight is not impaired, but he is left with a with a large trough in the middle of his face in the shape of a shoe horn which, say the doctors --he will eventually grow into. Intrigued, but extremely discomfited in the face of the matter-of-fact grotesqueness of what I was watching, I managed to sit through all 71 minutes, and am still not quite sure if this was for real or not ... In any case, one for the books!