In Federico Fellini’s masterpiece, La Dolce Vita, the wistful faux intellectual, Mr. Steiner remarked – “I am too serious to be a dilettante, and too much of a dabbler to be a professional.” Lets call him and his ilk ‘serious dabblers’ for the sake of convenience. This sentiment echoes among many of the privileged class of my generation. A class which grew up witnessing economic liberalization, cultural glasnost, breaking of traditional mores of defining ambition, profession, gender and relationships – it was promised that sky was the limit, at least till you ‘grow up’.

And this is the sentiment which lies at the point of departure between the swathes of serious dabblers on one side and the career dilettantes and professionals on the other side.  The protagonist of Tamasha is a true itinerant at heart. He is a wandering story teller fascinated by the tales of war and conquest, love and heart break, of epics and myths. But like Naseeruddin Shah in Monsoon Wedding, Boman Irani in Lakshya and Balraj Sahini in Waqt, our protagonist’s father is a child of India’s partition. Partition was a bitter tragedy which instilled a diehard spirit of self denial, hard work and zealous enterprise among those who started lives afresh. Such enterprise scoffed at wooly ideas of philosophical self discovery – an indulgence reserved only for the unambitious and unworthy. It is no accident that the high-achieving father in the movie is domineering and judgmental – an overpowering authority whose slightest disapproval is like a death knell to the son. In the face of such scathing scrutiny the son gives up.

With the automated monotony of what we call ‘growing up’, his creativity gets stifled and he finds himself in a corporate desk job. He makes soul crushing power point presentations using cliché after cliché to disinterested clients. His gift of inventive story telling falls flat in the face of regimented corporate speak with its punctilious rules of grammar, syntax and economy. His boss, once an entrepreneur, is now a happily risk averse corporate head who likes predictability and a market beating computed annual growth rate of profitability.

The protagonist has convinced himself that storytelling is an inferior calling. He is firmly ensconced in the corporate straitjacket and has throttled his original self. At a subliminal level he knows that the limited liability of the corporate form is causing him limitless pain but he has deliberately rendered even his gentle iconoclasm comatose. Till one fine day an old flame who had once witnessed the free spiritedness of his rolling stone days jolts him out of his hypnotic trance. So a ‘dilettante’ turned ‘professional’ was confronted with the fact that he has become a turncoat. This desperate awakening triggers a disturbing bipolarity in him. He is not sure where he belongs. He is too scared to pursue his passion and yet too revolted to turn up at the gut wrenching guillotine of creativity at work.  How he reverts to pursuing his childhood passion is a delightful process of self realisation and I strongly urge you to watch the movie.

But coming back to the scourge of the serious dabbler. Blessed are those who have a passion, are convinced that they are good at it and have the luxury to pursue it – like our protagonist. Or those who love the stability of a corporate life – the smooth income stream, promotions and bonuses and the appearance of success by association with the entity they work for- like the boss of the protagonist. The ‘serious dabblers’ are ailing. They dislike the ritual of turning up at work. They have read enough facebook posts and buzzfeed articles to know they are not alone in this state of disquiet. This brews a growing discontent and false sense of entitlement that they are cut out for something else – something more meaningful and rewarding which they will stumble across one fine day. But either they lack a passion or the conviction to pursue their passion thereby getting drawn into a vicious cycle of longing and self pity. More often than not, the happy resolution for them is the realisation that they have missed the ‘follow your passion bus’ and are making decent money in any case. So they follow the words of Ramadhir Singh, the pragmatic ganglord in Gangs of Wasseypur – “apni bhavnaon ko dalon apni gand mein..’ (i.e. stuff your feelings up your ass, and just get on with it). But for those who are unable to reach this convenient compromise, life can be like that of the forlorn Mr. Steiner.

Ranbir Kapoor has become the quintessential vagabond – the ‘khanabadosh’ of our times. However unlike his grandfather Raj Kapoor, the original wandering tramp of Bollywood, Ranbir Kapoor’s characters do not come from rural poverty or urban squalor.  They grow up in Golf Links or Pali Hill, have rich parents and privileged childhoods. Therefore the personal conflicts that they face can seem elitist compared to those faced by millions in the country who struggle to live a life of basic human dignity.  It reminds me of the poignant scene in Richard Linklater’s masterful ‘Boyhood’ where the rich white kids of a well off family are struggling to ‘find themselves’ whereas the poor immigrant Mexican kid who did odd jobs to pay for night school finally bags a white collar job and is thrilled to bits. You could either take the father’s side on this one and command the vagrant son to dutifully climb the corporate ladder, or choose to be sensitive and respect the subjective relativity of each ones’ personal demons – the call is yours.

But in this trichotomy of being a dilettante, a professional or a serious dabbler, please avoid being the third. Because it didn’t end too well for Mr. Steiner.

Singh’s address evoked no feeling whatsoever— the complete lack of inspiration is mirrored by my identical reactions to the hugely popular ‘Mere desh ki dharti’ from Upkar. The song is a simplistic representation of patriotism in a simplistic film that pits good brother against bad brother, noble, hard-working village India against the deceiving and traitorous urbane classes. Though sung evocatively, the song presents a romanticised, unbelievable and entirely imaginary account of rural India where everyone harvests crops rhythmically and has a permanent smile plastered on their faces. Cinematic license aside, the leitmotif of this song is an unabashed celebration of the nation, specifically the village, deliberately oblivious to its caste-ridden, faction-dominant, poverty-stricken nature. At the same time, its antara reads like a celebratory roll call of great Indians several of whom did not see eye-to-eye, a box-checking exercise to ensure that every audience member has a famous Indian to identify with and perhaps shed a tear for. In its conceptualisation and execution, the song is vapid, espousing support for a superficial and trite nationalism.

Singh’s speech was a similarly vacuous exercise. Its overriding theme was a celebration of his government’s achievement in the last decade and the Congress party’s since independence. All the tallest leaders were named, their virtues extolled, their shortcomings glossed over. Hearing his speech made me believe that all is, and has always been well in India and the little that is not will be made well through the oft-cited but seldom-found resolve, dedication and courage. Regarding the gargantuan problems that India faces today—corruption, debasement of public office, lack of respect for rights, abject poverty, there was only the briefest of token acknowledgements. Singh was like Manoj Kumar in ‘Mere desh ki dharti’ hoping to inspire the nation by mouthing trivialities. And unlike Kumar he didn’t even have either cinematic license to offer as an excuse or Mahendra Kapoor’s rich voice to spare him the blushes.

If Singh was banal, Modi was bluster. In my school-going days, the song ‘Suno gaur se duniyawalo… sabse aage hoge Hindustani’ from Dus was a massive rage. It captured the dominant mood of the nation at a time when the early fruits of liberalisation were beginning to manifest themselves—a country which was flexing its muscles on the world stage while recoiling to play victim at the slightest instigation. In its jingoism, the song was crass, urging flag-bearing Indians to repeat after the singers, an unfounded assertion of Indian superiority. Its constant frame of reference was the undefined other, who, so the song went, ought to be afraid of India and its growing might.

An analogous jingoism and crassness formed the two dominant themes of Modi’s speech. He unilaterally turned an annual Independence Day address into a slanging match with Singh, nit-picking deficiencies in the latter’s speech earlier in the day. Modi’s statements were undignified, repeatedly offering unsolicited advice to Singh on what his speech ought to have contained. In part they were also false, accusing Singh of pandering only to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty in recounting great leaders of the past, when he had very pointedly praised Narasimha Rao, the Prime Minister whose name has seemingly been airbrushed by the Congress party from its own and India’s history. His jingoism was evident in his choice of location, which he said meant that his words could be heard in Pakistan before they could be heard in Delhi, a clear indication of the aggressive brand of nationalism feeding on antipathy towards the other that he wishes to propagate.  At the same time, he constantly harped on the need for fellow feeling, not because it was per se necessary for a nation, but so that the world knows of India’s strength. If Singh’s speech left me wholly uninspired about the future of India, Modi along with the regular raucous applause he drew, gave rise to grave concern about what such a future portends.

Caught between a vapid Scylla and a blustering Charybdis, I turned mid-morning to Bollywood for succour. Bollywood’s pool of patriotic songs ranges from the sublime to the mediocre, the heart-rending to the sloganeering— an eclectic mix of odes of love to the nation especially when threatened by external forces, tributes to martyrs in films made in the aftermath of, or commemorating war, jingoistic ditties when a war has been resoundingly won or the mood in the nation is upbeat, and contemporary reinterpretations of freedom struggle classics. But there is another rarely acknowledged brand of patriotic Bollywood song that does not celebrate the nation, but rues its traits, does not praise its collectivity but demonises it, does not hide its weakness but exposes it. Through a criticism of the nation and its dominant mores, it presents a competing version of nationalism, one that manifests itself not in a raucous celebration of India’s might or a vainglorious recounting of its history but rather in a deep anguish born out of an unsurpassed love for the motherland.

Sahir Ludhianvi’s ‘Jinhe naaz hai Hind par, woh kahaan hai’ from Pyaasa is, for me, the epitome of such anguished love. Though written in the 1950s, Sahir’s musings about the complete erosion of values, sheer disrespect for women and the pervasion of an unabashed immorality in a bazaar replete with brothels, have a striking resonance in India today. Akin to a gigantic cesspool of immorality, in contemporary India, the chief aspiration is material wealth, deal-making and corruption are favourite pastimes and values are an antiquated annoyance. In such a situation, nationalism can neither remain a trite appeal to solidarity against an external enemy nor can it simply re-invoke the glories of the past. Nationalism in such times of straitened values must answer Sahir’s call—those who are proud of India and what it stands for must themselves stand up against injustice and refuse to be part of the blind pursuit of wealth and fame. They must themselves realise the fundamental truth—the threat to India today arises not from without but from within.

It is disappointing, but unsurprising that neither Singh nor Modi adopted anything close to such a poignant understanding of nationalism, identifying instead with the superficialities Bollywood offers. Harking to the successes of the past and holding them out as promises for the future as Singh did is to remain deliberately blinkered to the miasma that engulfs India today. At the same time, Modi’s appeal to the baser urges of Indians, urging them to come together against the external other, provides a palliative only to the lazy, unthinking individual. Neither bluster nor banality can be an excuse for a steadfast refusal to confront the true enemy to Indianness, which lies not across the border, but in ourselves. Sahir realised this with his beautifully iconoclastic words in the heady days of post-independence India. But in the India of today his words have survived only as poetry to be heard once a year on 15^th August and then forgotten.

Special Chabbis takes this very human yearning and fleshes it out into easily Bollywood’s best “heist” film of all time. Very loosely based on real life incidents, it’s a story of four rather ordinary people who, using their wits and guts, outsmart the real thieves and thugs of our age – crooked netas and businessmen – posing as CBI cops or taxmen. The premise is as simple as it is brilliant; target someone who will never file a complaint and who’ll unhappily write it off as a business loss rather than explain the source of the income. It’s a modern day Robin Hood tale that appeals, at some level, to our sense of justice.

Where heist films in the past have contrived to add glamour and good looks (think Ocean’s 12 & 13, Bunty aur Babli, and ugh, the Dhoom movies) to a rather thin plot, Special Chabbis adds character and emotion to a rich and layered plot that gets its vice-like hold on you and doesn’t let go for two-and-a-half hours straight. Ajay (Akshay Kumar), Sharma (Anupam Kher), Iqbal (Kishore Kadam) and Joginder (Rajesh Sharma) are not supposed to be people you’ll necessarily remember for the rest of your life. In their “regular” lives they’re battling concerns that anyone can identify with – a seemingly doomed love affair, a daughter’s wedding, a nagging and demanding wife, or a large family to take care of.

Yet, once every two months or so, they get together, put on their costumes, forge documents, plot meticulously, and pull off a stunning caper against someone rich with lots to hide. Whatever else they may be, for those few days, they strut in immaculately pressed clothes, speak in clipped accents (dipping into the vernacular only when strictly required) and fearlessly slap people of any rank. Though set in pre-liberalization India, it’s the ultimate wish-fulfillment of post-2G India – break the corporate-government nexus with half a dozen well timed whacks on the faces of the smug bastards. Oh and also steal all their ill gotten gains in the process. (It’s obviously fantasy because in the era of round-tripping, tax havens and corporate structuring, no one actually keeps large bundles of cash in easy reach anymore. As certain tax officers found out recently.)

The “Special Chabbis” of the title comes from the twenty-six bright (and not-so-bright), (mostly) young men and women who sign up with the Gang of Four, believing them to be CBI officers, to help them with their biggest and last heist – robbing the biggest jewellery store in town (based on the real-life Tribhovandas Bhimji Zaveri Jewellers heist in Bombay). To be part of the Special Chabbis is a once-in-a-birth chance to be part of the CBI elite by going through an interview, a written test and a “practical” (which is, needless to say, the actual heist). When an ad says that the CBI is recruiting and is looking for someone – who just might be you – for action, adventure and adrenaline, wouldn’t you jump at the chance, brush up your CV, clean up your looks, and practice your best tough-guy/girl-naivete thinking it makes you look formidable?

Never mind that the actual CBI has actually laid out a trap for you.

(Obviously there’s a stunning twist ending which I’m not going to reveal here!)

*****

Neeraj Pandey, with Special Chabbis, joins the happily growing list of Indian directors who’re hitting that sweet spot between utterly crass commercial and the snooty inaccessible art-film circuit. A group of directors which includes Zoya Akhtar, Dibakar Bannerjee, Tigmanshu Dhulia, Anurag Kashyap, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, Gauri Shinde among others who thrive in the multiplex viewer market with tight scripts, well cast and directed films that don’t equate entertainment with dumbing down of content. May their tribe (and output) increase.

While Neeraj Pandey’s work so far consists of only two movies, “A Wednesday” and “Special Chabbis”, located as they are in two very different genres, they address the same theme; the common man fights back against a seemingly insurmountable enemy in his own little way, using his wits and superior intelligence, sometimes against the forces of the law which are supposed to do this in the first place. It is fantasy of course, asking us to imagine that somehow your everyday guy will be able to access cutting edge technology to beat the government or have the necessary intelligence gathering skills to plan an elaborate fake raid. Yet, it’s a fantasy firmly rooted in a reality – present day Bombay in the case of A Wednesday and 1980s India in Special Chabbis – that makes us suspend our disbelief enough to believe in it. (Neeraj Pandey’s 1980s India is also a hipster’s delight – sweater vests, typewriters, vintage Marutis and Lambrettas, all awash in an Instagram-esque sepia. )

*****

On the face of it Akshay Kumar seems obviously miscast among a lot of fine character actors. Yet one doesn’t actually mind since he seems to be back doing what is obviously his forte – comedy. Akshay Kumar is at his comedic best not when he’s trying to be funny (all his disastrously unfunny “funny movies”) but when he plays it straight allowing the situation and the circumstances to bring the laughs (Hera Pheri and his cameo in the otherwise idiotic Om Shanti Om). Here, there’s no slapstick, no weird bodily quirks, no linguistic deformity or any other contrived attempt at humour – he allows his body language, the situation and the dialogue to bring the humour out.

Anupam Kher, while hilariously miscast as the no-nonsense top cop in “A Wednesday”, returns to playing a somewhat hassled, on-the-verge-of-retirement-middle aged man caring for his ever-growing brood – in other words pretty much everything good that he has done in the last 15 years or so (Khosla ka Ghosla, Bend it Like Beckham, Speedy Singhs) Yet, give him the lines, give him his crew and his cream coloured bush-shirt and corduroy pants, and he suddenly becomes a no-nonsense government official of unimpeachable integrity and titanium strength testicular fortitude. (On a side note, it would be beyond brilliant if in a weird comic-type crossover, Sharma of Special Chabbis was actually Khosla of Khosla ka Ghosla!)

Every good heist film has a dogged representative of the law who, despite his many limitations (lack of imagination, foresight and charm) proves a formidable foe through sheer persistence and doggedness in never giving up the chase till the end. Manoj Bajpayee’s Waseem Khan is a CBI officer and all about what actual police work really is – doing the dull, obvious things until you get a breakthrough, and in the Indian context, the threat of torture to obtain information. He is, in some ways, the polar opposite of Tom Hanks’ Carl Hanratty in Catch Me if You Can - menacing, self-assured, and charismatic and yet, at the end of the day, a proper family man who gives his kid a joy-ride to the school bus and worries about paying his bills. He could easily be Sardar Khan’s less-lecherous long-lost brother, just on the right side of the law this time.

As with the leads, Pandey gets most of the casting of the supporting roles spot on – witness Tiku Talsania’s Porky Pig act as the  owner of the targeted jewelry store in Bombay. Jimmy Shergill, who always seems to have the burden of the world upon his shoulders anytime he’s required to carry a film, fits neatly into his small-ish role that though has him appearing throughout, though it gives him rather little to do on screen most of the time.

Like with “A Wednesday”, Neeraj Pandey has little space for women in Special Chabbis. In both films, they’re usually in the periphery or background – a side track to the main story about the tussle of wills between clever/devious men. Maybe it’s a serious flaw in his directorial ability and vision or perhaps he hasn’t yet found the right script with strong female characters. Either way, one hopes Special Chabbis turns out to be a runaway hit that allows him to do something slightly different just as well, the next time around.

Coda:

1. Actual raids are far depressing and less entertaining, as I’ve written before.

2. The real-life Tribhovandas Bhimji Zaveri Jewellers heist has never been solved.

]]> http://www.criticaltwenties.in/mediapopularculture/special-chabbis-2013/feed 5 http://www.criticaltwenties.in/mediapopularculture/talaash-2012-still-searching-for-a-good-heading http://www.criticaltwenties.in/mediapopularculture/talaash-2012-still-searching-for-a-good-heading#comments Mon, 03 Dec 2012 17:18:19 +0000 Arghya http://www.criticaltwenties.in/?p=5139 (This has spoilers only if you assume that there’s anything to be spoilt in the first place. I think there isn’t.)

I left the theatre having watched Talaash with the overwhelming sense of having been cheated. This is perhaps a backhanded testament to how good the movie is for three-quarters of its duration. It starts as a gripping whodunit, has some unexpected twists and turns, seamlessly straddles two seemingly parallel storylines without a semblance of discordance and sets itself up beautifully for a grandstand finale. Except that the finale, was not the bang than I expected, nor was it a conciliatory whimper. It was more like a fart. A long, stinky, nauseating fart that you don’t believe possible till you are forcibly made to witness it. Little surprise then that at the culmination of a movie that had gripped and moved me in equal measure, any virtues it had accumulated paled into a malodorous, fart-induced feeling of having been cheated out of a particularly happy evening.

My reactions to Talaash are stronger than most other movies solely because of the starkness of the contrast between its flawed and bizarre culmination and its sophisticated and gripping build-up. Till the interval, the movie for me was a blink-and-you-miss-it thriller. It wasn’t mind-numbingly fast, in fact it was delightfully slow. The pace constructed a certain intimacy with which the scenes could be carefully created, characters could come into their own and relationships portrayed. The most telling representative of the pace was the haunting, soulful and eerily appropriate soundtrack by Ram Sampath which, by itself, shaped the ebb and flow of the first half. Particularly Muskaaney Jhoothi Hai revealed more about the characters and the plot than any dialogue sequence could.

The depictions too were frighteningly real. Characters weren’t caricatured in black-and-white, most of them were very attractive greys. The persecuted servant-beggar persecuted who dreams of a shot of fame and filling his master’s shoes; the elderly prostitute taunted by her peers and clients who is resigned to her fate, yet wants her freedom, the subordinate police officer, diligent yet voyeuristic all make the movie look and feel real, depicting, what could be a snapshot of modern-day Kamathipura and its quotidian ways. As real, is the marriage between policeman and homemaker, wrecked by the untimely death of their son and the different ways in which they mourn their loss, poignantly accentuated by restrained and pithy dialogues and overt silences. What makes this reality most believable is unsurprisingly the wonderful acting by the lead and supporting actors. All of them, without exception, play their part to perfection.

But I’m writing this piece to bury Talaash not to praise it.

Despite all its virtues, Talaash fails woefully as a movie by using a fantastic super-natural plot device as the common strand to bring its parts together. While the use of the super-natural is a fairly common occurrence in movies, in Talaash, it was problematic at two levels. First, the movie not only used the super-natural, it unquestioningly affirmed its reality. A fundamental premise that the lead actor prominently questions through the movie is the possibility of communicating with spirits, which seems to me to be a perfectly legitimate line of inquiry. By the end of the movie, not only is he left mincing his own words (in fact he’s crying because he was so badly wrong), we, the audience are left with a firm and dogmatic directorial assertion that the super-natural exists, the testament to which is Talaash, the two-and-a-half hour long movie which we just were witness to, whose every post-interval move was shaped by a super-natural guiding light. This retrograde social message, affirming belief in the irrational, that such a movie, starring the leading lights of Hindi cinema sends out, is in itself is reason enough to dislike the movie. Especially for Aamir Khan, fresh from Satyameva Jayate to be seen endorsing such a backward and superstitious message by choosing to be part of this enterprise, is gut-wrenchingly disappointing.

But it’s just a movie, I hear you say. And that’s where the super-natural element in Talaash, or should I say, the super-natural periodic table, given its all-pervasiveness, fails at the second level. In Talaash, the way it had been set up, with taut storylines, pithy dialogues and real suspense, the super-natural twist at the end that provides a post facto explanation for the entire movie is a massive cop-out. It’s a cop-out to square loose ends by introducing an all-powerful apparition that can go around crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s wherever they need crossing and dotting. And that too is perfectly acceptable in several movies where the super-natural element is put to good use. But most such movies are mostly meaningless, badly directed, non-serious capers. And Talaash, was just not set up as one of those. It was a real movie, with real characters, real situations, moral dilemmas, depression accompanied by snatches of happiness, an overwhelming sense of loss, friendships, rivalries, relationships, in fact it was the microcosm of what it meant to be human. A humanity which was irreversibly spoilt with silly super-naturalism of an extraordinary variety.

It’s easy for a script-writer to find a ghostly, other-worldly explanation to a real murder mystery. But because it’s so easy, it’s also inelegant, dissatisfying and a profound testament to his lack of intellectual ability.  Imagine how short-changed you’d feel if in Murder on the Orient Express, Ratchett/ Cassetti was not killed by each of his fellow passengers but by an all-powerful crow which flew into his compartment through his open train window and pecked him to death. That’s how I felt after Talaash, a movie that its makers ruined as dextrously as they had made it.

]]> http://www.criticaltwenties.in/mediapopularculture/talaash-2012-still-searching-for-a-good-heading/feed 1 http://www.criticaltwenties.in/mediapopularculture/why-i-could-never-win-student-of-the-year http://www.criticaltwenties.in/mediapopularculture/why-i-could-never-win-student-of-the-year#comments Fri, 02 Nov 2012 13:34:29 +0000 Arghya http://www.criticaltwenties.in/?p=5112 [A Guest Post by Suharsh Sinha. Suharsh is a lawyer working in London who can be regularly found outside Cineworld Shaftesbury Avenue on every Friday of a Bollywood movie's London release]

It is not with the greatest pride that I admit that I was one of the first few people who queued up to watch K’Jo’s latest charade, SOTY. For the avoidance of doubt, I am talking about Karan Johar’s Student of the Year. Using acronyms, as we well know, is a desperate crutch KJo’s marketing machine uses to make him, his products and his consumers sound sexier and more youthful.

I don’t fancy myself as a movie critic and this is not a movie review. So I will not go into issues of screenplay and plot. But, even if was a movie review, I needn’t have expounded on such trivialities because having a plot is a liberty KJo consistently refrains from taking. Which begs the question: What is this piece that you are reading? Without any KJo style pretensions, I must confess this is just an angry rant. By somebody (an urban, middle class NRI living in London) who is often vilified as the core audience of KJo’s vacuous experiments with truth.
This movie is about 3 school kids and a school like no other. The kids are beautiful, have impossibly toned bodies are super-rich or super talented. As an apology for being so privileged, they have been provided with a convenient sob-story background. They study in an unreal elite Indian school which would put Doon or Mayo to shame. The movie also has a caricatured gay principal (called ‘Dean’ in the American style) and a football coach who dresses immaculately but is seldom seen coaching the team. The emphasis is on sanitised locations, good looks and Fifth-avenue brands including a Burberry umbrella that the Dean carries when he is out in the sun. If you were wondering where KJo discovered such a talented star cast to essay these deep characters from, you wont be surprised. Hero No. 1 is David Dhawan’s son (pun unintended), Hero No. 2 was his Assistant Director and the Heroine is Mahesh Bhatt’s daughter.  And the Dean is Rishi Kapoor who KJo calls ‘Chintu Uncle’ as the most reliable newspaper of our times – the Times of India, or rather ToI dutifully reports. The nerdy fat boy is Boman Irani’s son. This is jugaad at its Indian best and the cast looks more incestuous than the Lok Sabha.
So why has this movie made me feel so violated that I’m having to vent my anger in public? Its nothing personal to be honest. But then there is nothing personal when Ravindra Jadeja plays for India either. It’s just, well…irritating. And irritating on several counts. But since I run the risk of being labelled a fashionable anti-KJo bigot, let me present my case.

First, I am not a feel-good-movie basher. I believe that the average viewer is not biased against any particular genre of movies – it is the quality and depth of the movie that matters. So it is not a fairy tale/candy floss romance that I am opposed to. I am just opposed to it being done in a templated and insincere manner. Jo Jeeta Wahi Sikanadar, Dil Hai Ki Manta Nahin (incidentally a Roman Holiday rip-off) or Jab We Met and Jane Tu Ya Jane Na – all fall in the same broad genre as SOTY. But they had believable characters, relatable situations and some genuinely touching moments. SOTY on the other hand has the feel and look of an assembly line product. I can safely say that each Tata Nano has more character and individuality than SOTY.

Secondly, I am not a pretentious art house aficionado. You don’t have to love Nihalani, Ray, Polanski or Kurosawa to hate KJo. I am just your average movie goer. But KJo is unfortunately too average a film maker. Except for My Name is Khan (or MNIK) I have seen all his movies in snippets on TV/youtube. And I deliberately avoided MNIK since it was touted as KJo’s Citizen Kane and that was a threat grave enough for me to avoid it even on an Air India flight. KJo’s world view starts with South Bombay and ends with the Upper East or Hyde Park. Again, mind you, I am not saying that good cinema has to be about farmer suicides, slum children or mofussil monotony. But a director who once famously remarked that he has never seen a real farmer in his life obviously has a very blinkered world view. This half baked vision of the complex and stratified world we live in obviously gets reflected even when he is portraying the GMT and GMT +4.30 time zone that he dwells in. His fallacy lies in failing to realise that most of the young NRI/urban Indian audience also come from towns and middle class families teeming in the India living beyond Cuffe Parade and GK II. Their aspirations, value systems, ambitions and even mundane lives are hardly captured in KJO’s fantasy fests. On the other hand someone like Imtiaz Ali who started off by funding his amateur theatre group in Jamshedpur from donations from Tata employees and after a long struggle found his space in Bollywood captures the subtlety and romance of daily lives much more accurately. Movies like Love Aaj Kal or Jab We Met, by no means Laxman’s 281, are still Kohli’s 183. They too deal with urban romance yet they have characters and stories which most of us in our lives have seen or experienced. They seem quite dramatic and’movie like’, yet you feel – Hey ! that almost happened to me once ! That I believe is where the romance in romantic movies lies. KJo sells you a fake world of riches, beauty and vanity.

Lastly, what irks me is KJo’s endorsement of the 2 worst Hindi movie hangovers from the 80s and 90s – mainstream Bollywood’s most creatively bankrupt and mediocre era – oversimplification of characters and reductionism of storylines. People are either cloyingly sweet or despicable war criminals. And even the Idi Amins of KJo’s movies realise before the end that their moral compass was on IOS6 and conveniently revert to Google maps. And of course, to add emotional depth, someone has to die in a KJo movie. The person dying either had a personality defect thereby giving rise to the central (and most banal) conflict in the movie; or was ‘devta saman’ and led a life of profound sacrifice and humanity overflowing with the milk of human kindness. Either way his/her death brings about a KJo equivalent of a cabinet re-shuffle in the movie. Characters mutate from fitting into stereotype A into stereotype B. Those who didn’t realize the value of true love, family, sacrifice and related emotions conveniently begin to do so and are handsomely rewarded with more melodramatic scenes. Those who always possessed such altruistic depths are rewarded with silent ‘I – told – you -so’ tears rolling down in slow motion. Those who lie in the middle don’t get into the movie in the first place.

I could go on much much longer. But I work in a law firm and have a deadline to meet. And my boss happens to be an Idi Amin without any moral compass. But I can’t resist one final argument: KJO believers might say that in the ultimate analysis what matters is how much money the movie has made. To them I would point out something a very wise and dear friend with a panache for instant logic once told me. In the dying throes of a losing an argument where my choice of popular fiction (Shoaib Akhtar’s autobiography) had outsold his choice he delivered the killer punch – ‘there is a youtube video of a man peeing on a cat and it has a million views – that it is popular does not make it good’. Just to buttress my point, Laxman’s 281 doesn’t come close to a million view on Youtube.

[Photo credit: http://www.bollywoodhungama.com]

Bollywood, more specifically ‘Bad’ Bollywood (I’m going to use ‘Bad’ Bollywood as shorthand for this sort of movie- examples: Mohabbatein, Singham, Golmaal Returns) even more specifically the kind of Bollywood that makes most people whinge, makes me happy. The reason, after a great deal of soul-searching, is attributable to the stark contrast that ‘Bad’ Bollywood offers to the pretentiously cerebral, library-toting, seminar-attending life of a doctoral student that I lead otherwise. At the end of a week of reading and discussing normative objections, second-order concerns, background justifications and necessary but not sufficient conditions, ‘Bad’ Bollywood with its black-and-white characters, simplistic storylines, contrived conflicts, desperate drama, mindless song-and-dance sequences and happy endings, provides the perfect antidote. Together with higher academia, it makes for a wonderful combination: the sublime and the ridiculous, the deep and the flippant, the staggeringly complex and the wonderfully simple (you guess which is which), working together to maintain the cosmic equilibrium in my world.

My love for ‘Bad’ Bollywood shared only by a very select few in my immediate milieu of friends, leads to a larger question: What is the purpose of watching cinema? Film-makers who are considered to be timeless masters of their art, such as Kurosawa, Fellini, Scorcese, Ray, to name but a few, while each distinctive, capture something elemental, something fundamentally human through their story-telling, be it love, humour or tragedy. Common to them all is their ability to connect with their audience, to evoke a groundswell of feeling, that makes their film-making widely considered world-class. By implication, the proper purpose of watching cinema (though I’d like to think it’s the purpose of watching proper cinema) seems to be, at its baseline, the desire to be moved by a story to a range of diverse emotions. But what about movies which simply set out to entertain? That transport one through their inanities to an obviously make-believe world where the good always prevails over evil and the hero wins out? True, they don’t stir any groundswell of emotion nor appeal to anything deep, but surely the purpose of watching cinema can simply be light-hearted entertainment? At least that’s why I go to spend three hours of my life in a darkened theatre: To escape on the wings of the timepass entertainment provided, away from the world I usually live in for the rest of the week.

So, a poor D.Phil. writing week was made good by Mausam on the weekend, an epic love story spanning three decades which was both unintentionally corny and refreshingly naïve; personal hassles were set right by I Hate Luv Storys which demonstrated with perfect conviction as to why one must always have faith in things working out even if a grasp of basic English spellings is beyond us; a month of law library solitude firmly quashed by Action Replayy, a horrendously contrived piece of cinema which only two people in the auditorium didn’t walk out of, and loved to bits. And of course no such list is complete without Sallu Bhai’s Bodyguard with its killer twist in the tale that had me in momentary shock and permanent rapture.

From Shammi Kapoor’s carefree dances to woo his beloved, to Yash Chopra’s song-and-dance sequences in sylvan Swiss surroundings to Karan Johar’s plush English palaces reverberating with Bhangra music, ‘Bad’ Bollywood has held itself out as a launchpad to neverland. It has been unabashedly and unashamedly escapist, trading the miseries and complexities of quotidian existences for the agonies and ecstasies of its make-believe world. In this age of globalising cinema, as ‘Bad’ Bollywood competes with meaningful Bollywood, commercial Hollywood and art house world-cinema, its space unfortunately seems to be shrinking. Which makes me worry deeply about my doctorate and whether and how it will ever end. But before such thoughts can go too far, wafts in the words,

‘Zor ka jhatka hai zoro se laga,

Shaadi ban gayi umar quaid ki saza

Yeh hai udaasi jaan ki pyaasi

Shaadi se achha tum le lo phaansi

Shaadi ke mandap se tu khud ko bhaga.’

And the world’s a happy place once again.

First, sample the image below:

This is Anil Kapoor in 1985. Long dishevelled hair, the compulsory 80s moustache, the leather jacket with steel shoulder buttons, epitomising the aspirational apogee of male machismo and an innocent smile, longing for something unattainable yet content. Much like a smile of happiness on seeing someone you love but who you know will never be yours.

Now take a look at the next image:

This is Anil Kapoor in 2009. Gelled hair, styled impeccably, black tie and tuxedo, the signature outfit of male Hollywood filmstars at any event that matters, hands spread wide taking in the applause for an uninspiring cameo in Slumdog Millionaire and a smile which says ‘I’ve arrived’. Oh and perhaps a botoxed face as well.

The changing face of Anil Kapoor in the last two-and-a-half decades is as accurate a reflection as any, of the changing face of India, pre and post-liberalisation. Awkwardness and innocence replaced by an easy conviviality, a seamless integration into the ways of the world and a constant quest for global recognition. With a growing economy has come an unquestioning assertiveness, with liberalisation a chutzpah loudly declaring India’s arrival on the world stage, and with fame, success and the world’s attention, a constant desire for gratification based on the flattery of others, fueling at times into a self-righteous rage in not getting one’s due, or a vicious one-upmanship to show who’s boss.

Take the BCCI in world cricket. The recent independent governance review of the ICC by Lord Woolf, suggested large-scale changes to the governance structure of the ICC so that it is not dominated by a few powerful boards with vested interests, but rather becomes optimally independent so that it can fulfil its role as “the leader of the international game”.  The suggestions, while certainly provocative, have considerable merit especially given the universal recognition of the flux that world cricket is in currently with three formats competing for time and attention and the increasing feeling that something is going to give. At the very least it deserved the BCCI’s fullest consideration. However the BCCI Working Committee, unsurprisingly, viewed the report as a threat to their dominance of the game and rejected it outright without going into which of the proposals it was against, let alone explaining why it took such a stand. This increasing proclivity to play victim while being the bully, epitomised by the BCCI, is a curious and defining trait of 21^st Century, post-liberalisation India.

Again, take a look at how the Indian media discusses success stories of Indians abroad. Particularly striking in recent memory was the euphoric coverage in sections of the Indian media regarding the appointmnet of Nikki Haley as Governor of South Carolina. The fact that a person of Asian origin, that too a woman, became Governor of a state in the deep South is certainly news anywhere. But in India it was not just news; it was a cause for celebration because Nikki Haley, originally Nimrata Randhawa was born to Sikh parents, and thus her victory was India’s victory. Never mind that she is as Indian as Barack Obama is Muslim and is constantly at pains to point out her Americanness, exemplified by her unimaginative and convenient change of name. The Indian media’s desire to seek out such success stories, to crave for the world’s attention through imagined notions of achievement is not its sole doing: it’s rather an incident of the operation of the market, reflective of what the middle-class Indian consumer wants to read, and the sort of stories that make him happy.

Underlying this new India, like the new Anil Kapoor is an excessive desire to be accepted on the world stage. Otherwise why would Kapoor agree to an unchallenging role of a lecherous, skirt-chasing Indian millionaire who appeared on screen for a sum total of four minutes only to be made a fool of ultimately, in Mission Impossible 4, one of the most mindless action films to be made in the history of cinema? Clearly, Kapoor himself or the Indian film fraternity didn’t think the same way since post-MI4 he became the toast of tinseltown, celebrated as India’s first real crossover star. Key to this ‘new and improved’ Kapoor and the new India, is a pervading sense of falsity, a pretence of being something or someone that one is not. Much like India’s standard story to the world today of being a country of exceptional growth whose teeming poor, despite leading desperately woeful existences are suffused by the hope of a better, brighter tomorrow.  Nothing could be further from the truth. And unlike Kapoor’s wrinkles, there’s no botox to cure this one.

This is not to suggest that pre-liberalisation India was a beautiful place where everyone was poor but happy, innocent and contented. There is a natural tendency to look at history with rose-tinted glasses, harking back to the past as a ‘golden age’ where everything was perfect. Pre-liberalisation India was anything but. Like Anil Kapoor in 1985, it was all over the place, a trifle cheesy, unambitious and easily satisfied. But its one redeeming feature though was that it was comfortable with its own identity, not chasing false hopes and basking in global encomiums that are clever disguises to tap into India’s ever bulging middle class wallets.

So what should we do about it? Well, nothing except hope that soon Anil Kapoor realises in real life, like he did on screen 25 years ago, that it’s best for India if he becomes invisible.

The Invisible Mr. India

[Photo sources: Here and Here]

There was much hype over Dirty Picture. Pakistan banned its release, and Ekta Kapoor unleashed upon us a saucy promo which got every Vidya Balan fan hungry, thirsty and desperate for this promising slice of bootylicious cinema. From what could be gathered from an interview with Ekta Kapoor and Vidya Balan on release night, the ladies who watched it found the movie ‘uplifting’ and the men just couldn’t wait for the ‘dirty’ picture. The reviews for Dirty Picture have been especially generous in their praise for the ‘bold’ and ‘balanced’ depiction of a sex symbol of the 80s with the stellar performance of Vidya Balan, not to mention, some over the top efforts at direction by Milan Luthria and script writing by Rajat Arora

Film reviewing in India often lends itself to glorifying films where the heart is in the right place, irrespective of cinematic merit, and the rave reviews received by Dirty Picture are a case in point. Dirty Picture is bold, sexy and in many ways pioneering in Indian cinema, but it is not by any stretch of imagination a great film. Vidya Balan’s performance was laudable but by no means exceptional, and she has not bettered her previous performances by a far margin. Praise for the director and script writer are ill-founded. The story telling was weak, and the film messily edited, and the talents of Naseeruddin Shah and Vidya Balan all but wasted. For anyone who has watched Ishqiya (vastly underrated at the box office), the potential of these two actors together in a movie is obvious, and in stark contrast to what came about in Dirty Picture.  We saw unengaging, and black and white characters, the villainous Suryakanth (Naseeruddin Shah) who stereotypes a class of successful men, a devious film critic (Anju Mahendroo) and the duplicitous Ramakanth (Tusshar Kapoor). The saving grace, among all the typecasting seemed to be the role played by Emraan Hashmi – human, flawed, affected and dynamic. A function of his time and the story, something which seemed to miss the characterization of the rest, including ‘Silk’ who were as cut, dry and unengaging as the storyline.  

This is especially tragic in light of the material that the producers and directors of the movie had at their disposal – the glamour of 80s cinema, filmmaking in the south Indian film industry, and an extremely sexy protagonist. It goes without saying that on many counts, Dirty Picture has done what hasn’t been done before. It is a biopic of an actress comfortable with her sexuality, who delivers in an industry dominated by men, who discards social mores, and heartily follows her dreams. In a conservative society, what she does, and how she goes about doing it are exceptional. The character sought to be portrayed is difficult, any director and script writer had to continuously refrain from desentisizing their characterisation by unintentionally sleazeballing the protagonist. But as much as critics have liked us to believe so, the balance isn’t all that difficult to strike. And even if it was, to be completely honest, Dirty Picture didn’t really manage to strike it. It is a fairly clean movie, with few outrageous scenes. The Dirty Picture by Ekta Kapoor isn’t as ‘dirty’ as they would have us believe. By calling it that, Ekta Kapoor has pulled off a coup which many (though by no means all) film critics and audiences have bought into.

If not anything, Dirty Picture had the license to be erotic and entertaining, and uplifting for the feministically inclined. It wasn’t erotic by any stretch of imagination, and what it does to reclaim space for women is highly debatable. Silk’s bold unabashed ways and struggles uphold means that few women today may see as worthy of replication, however admirable (in the context of the times).  It certainly is entertaining, and as much as we seek to find explanation, there isn’t much more than that to explain the $ 4 million it has made since opening last Friday.

Right now, urban Indian youth stand divided into 2 categories: those who adored Delhi Belly and those who were vaguely repulsed by it. Yes, I’m currently the sole torchbearer of the latter category and obviously, looking for supporters. I cannot fathom the raptures on Facebook about how the movie personifies the posterior and elevates it to fourth lead status, about how it captures sleeping men so accurately, about how well Aamir Khan’s chest hair vest and his heart shaped, stone-studded belt suit him. Why, the movie doesn’t even spare biscuits! Milwaukee

I must hasten to clarify that I’m in no way undermining Delhi Belly’s stellar contribution to Indian Cinema, in fact, its contribution extends far beyond. For one, it’s an extended plug for the Urban Dictionary. It’s also a big lesson on how food and scratching unacceptable places should not be allowed to mix. It’s also a sober treatise on the poor sanitary conditions, poor housing Gonflables Piscine, and poor condition of electrical fittings prevailing in our country. Besides, our news channels will surely kill to lay their hands on such genius material; very soon, News 9 Bengaluru will report about a man who stopped his ex-lover’s marriage the way Vir Das did.

Whatever it may be, the movie in its own campy style has endeared itself to most. What this implies about the ‘most’, I surely do not know; what I do know is that nothing, just nothing, beats Vijay Raaz’s expression when he carefully spreads the contents of the initial bottle on the red velvet cloth spread out before him. Or Vir Das’ attempt at drinking water through the burqa.

Campy stuff always appeals at some level. It manages to tap into some secret, uptight corner of the human psyche and shakes up things held there, resulting in some loud, surprise filled laughter. Surprise that what we’re watching is so bad, and surprise that we actually find it funny, even though we’re simultaneously crinkling our noses or shaking our heads in disgust. Camp is stuff so atrocious that it becomes good, even though its true value may be admitted only in private, away from everything that is sound, sensible and politically correct. Think Borat. Or closer home, Mithun-da as Gunmaster G9; Amitabh Bachchan as Ajooba battling a ‘Fauladi Shaitaan’ in someplace called Baharistan; Jeetendra as a ‘khuda ka nek banda’ in Dastaan-e-Hatimtai where he has to answer 7 existential questions to save a fairy from being permanently turned to stone; Rajnikanth dressed in black to confuse the villain and singing ‘My name is Nobody, his name is Somebody, I want that Somebody, Om hari Om’; esteemed C20 columnist Alok dancing to this, the list goes on.

Recently, I watched (along with 5 other people in the multiplex) an intriguing movie called ‘Fox’, where the plot revolved around a book written by a criminal lawyer titled ‘Fix the Fox’. Considerable scene time was wasted on every character commenting that the title of the book was well, so interesting. In another gem meta-movie called Naqaab, Bobby Deol fools his girlfriend (and us), makes a movie out of her infidelity and blackmails her, remarking that if she doesn’t play by his rules, her lover (an aspiring actor) ‘will not be a superstar, he will be sirf porn star’. This movie (i.e. the movie within Naqaab) wins the ‘best movie’ award for its realistic portrayal, at the Cannes, no less. And, oh, in Baghbaan (the tear-jearker, where selfish children and evil daughters-in-law separate the parents) the book wins the Booker Prize, didyaknow?

Why harp on fiction? When 26/11 was unfolding in Bombay, among all the sombre reporting, India TV chose to focus on the pigeons which had made Churchgate their home. They showed a solitary pigeon flying, with a emotionally charged voice, ‘Dekhiye in kabootaron ko- yeh shhayad soch rahein hai ki inka ghar achanak kahan gaya’. Not to be outdone, News 9 Bengaluru once ran a half an hour programme (maybe longer, I couldn’t watch anymore) on how a woman’s silicone implants saved her from a bullet; detailed descriptions followed about the thickness and of the implant, the length of the bullet, the angle of its trajectory, etc. The last scene I saw was of the smiling, happily endowed woman thanking her plastic surgeon.

Now, since camp abounds all over, it looks like a huge task to pick the camp star that shines the brightest. But, the answer is easier than you can imagine. Trivia: it’s the longest running show on Indian TV. No? Take a second look at the title of this piece. No, still? Tune in to Sony TV on Fridays at 10 pm to catch CID in all its campy glory. Menacing sharkface ACP Pradyuman, Senior Inspector Abhijeet, darwaza-tod Daya, ace forensic doctor, Salunke, his assistant Dr. Tarika (who has a love-track with Abhijeet), henpecked Inspector Fredricks will all be there, tackling crime in rather innovative storylines. The single most amazing thing about this programme is how all these actors take themselves seriously while shooting for it (along with the frightened expression of the common public in the serial, when ‘Hum CID se hain‘ is thrown at them).

Once Salunke was deeply examining some samples from a laash and Tarika was bending over the same- suddenly, Saluke screeches from his end, ‘Us laash ko mat choona, laash ko swine flu hain‘ (this was CID trying to be relevant during the swine flu scare). He only allows her near the laash after she wears an astronaut costume and he sprays her with some liquid from top to bottom. Another episode had a master stroke of a dialogue, ‘CID se bola hua jhoot makkhan ki tarah hota hai- jaise jaise garmi badhti hain woh pighalta jaata hai‘. In another, CID solved a murder mystery involving a model who had somehow managed to poison the lipstick of a rival. The episode ended with sharkface becoming all moralistic about how women have changed over the years, and uttering his parting shot, ‘Ab tum zindagi bhar jail mein sadoge‘. I really wish I could think of more nuggets.

There, I hope I’ve managed to put across the point that camp is such an integral part of our culture and makes for, well, at least a different kind of entertainment. Then you may ask, why I didn’t like Delhi Belly? I was dreading this question, for the answer is embarrassing; I ended up watching the movie in Hindi and obviously, had issues grasping the nuances of the abuses.

You bet I’m going to watch it again.

India’s regional cinema most often gets swamped by Bollywood’s glitter, glamour and gold. In terms of technical and critical achievement, Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Marathi films match, and more often than not, outstrip Bollywood. While ostensibly catering to the tastes of a linguistic minority in this country (which usually far outstrips the audience of most other language films), the stories they tell and the techniques they adopt are universal, appealing to an audience wider than the narrow confines of language. Being a Kannada speaker myself, I will happily gush for hours to a non-Kannada audience about the brilliance of Puttanna Kanagal’s movies, Girish Karnad’s thoughtful, but taut scripts, songs featuring the rich and nuanced voice of Dr. Rajkumar (this is heresy, but I think he was a better singer than actor, this notwithstanding), the dazzlingly brilliant, but all too short career of the late Shankar Nag, and the undoubted greatness of Kannada movies that rank alongside the best made in India. No doubt connoisseurs of Bengali, Tamil, Malayali and other regional cinema will do the same. Yet, I am going to recommend to you a Marathi movie as one of the finest made in India in the last couple of decades.inflatable slides

“Harishchandrachi Factory” is the story of how that great pioneer of Indian cinema, Dhundiraj Govind “Dadasaheb” Phalke, made the first Indian movie, Raja Harischandra. Part-biopic, part-comedy and part-movie-about-making-a-movie, but all brilliant, Harischandrachi Factory is a fantastic debut effort by director Paresh Mokashi that will tell you a grand tale with a light touch, bring to life Phalke’s heartbreaking struggle in a manner that never weighs you down and yet, amid all of that, entertain you through and through. Any movie which did that is of course a must-watch, but Harishchandrachi Factory does more.

Harischandrachi Factory is also an “origin story” in the sense that it is the movie about the birth of the behemoth that is Bollywood. It is a tale that is nothing short of inspiring. From having to sell all his furniture (and his wife’s jewellery) to fund the project to having to bail out his cast and crew from the clutches of a suspicious police officer, Phalke does it all without a complaint, with an almost-insane conviction of his success. Even the actual flop of the film on the first day of its release does not deter him. He just invents the concept of post-release marketing. We watch as the lines swell, the crowds flock and the money rolls in at the ticket counters and Bollywood as we know it, is born.

I watched Harishchandrachi Factory many months ago; the last screening of the film at a sparsely filled multiplex audi. Much as I enjoyed the movie, as I walked out of the screening, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of sadness as I reflected upon its fate at the box office. Clearly, this movie deserved a wider audience and better publicity. True, it swept almost every award in every competition it was entered in, within the country, but as India’s entry for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, it was an orphan abandoned to its fate at the uncaring hands of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Within the country itself, it played to small audiences, mostly in multiplexes, apart from the Marathi theatres.

To me, this reeks of ingratitude. Star actors and directors, to say nothing of producers and studios, rake in billions but seem to know little of the history or the origin of the industry that has spawned their success. India may have had a film industry without Dadasaheb Phalke, but it is hard to imagine that it would have grown to become the mass media mammoth that it has become without his pioneering vision. Where film may have been seen as an “educative” tool or a primarily a canvas for high art, Phalke envisioned at as being first, and foremost, an entertainment tool, and an industry that employed the skills and talents of hundreds towards commercial success. Perhaps he understood that it was a medium that had the capacity to reach out to an unlettered country, and would cater to an audience that was trying to find its cultural moorings in an increasingly urban environment. His movies, in that sense, aimed at the largest and broadest audience possible; a philosophy that Bollywood followed with great success for the better part of a century, but regrettably, in this millennium, seems to have abandoned in favour of pandering to that insidious demographic, “the multiplex crowd“. (Of course, I am being unduly harsh, but Bollywood’s bent towards the affluent upper middle class is unmistakeable all the same)

It goes without saying that sport and cinema unites Indians in a manner that few other institutions have been able to do so. Our political science professor in college (himself a native Telugu speaker) never ceased to point out that Bollywood did so much more for the promotion of Hindi in South India and East India than any half a dozen Government departments or Government initiatives. Indian cinema could have contented itself with critical acclaim, niche and elite audiences, or just the capture of linguistic markets. Yet Bollywood, warts and all, is something akin to a national cultural product, precisely because of its ability to cut across barriers of language and appeal to the widest possible audience, within and without India. Its success is not the prerogative of the actors, big or small, directors, producers, distributors or the audience. Its success is the greater than the sum of its parts, and much of it, owes to the initial vision of Dadasaheb Phalke as he took great risks and sacrificed much to make Raja Harishchandra.

And yet, and yet; he is forgotten so easily. True, a national award for life-long contribution to cinema is named after him, and rightly so, but it tells us little of the struggle, the vision or the man. It should a matter of great national pain that there are no remaining prints of Raja Harishchandra, destroyed as the last remaining one was by a fire that seems to be the hallmark of the callousness with which history is “preserved” in this country. There is not even a single photo or still from that great film.

And when a Marathi movie is made to remember the progenitor of Bollywood, what is the collective reaction of his scions in cinema? Indifference. And silence.

Still, it is no reason to lose heart entirely. The film is out on DVD (it’s available online on Flipkart as well) and if you were not one of the fortunate few to have caught it in the theatre, you can still enjoy this delightful film in the comforts of your home and reflect upon the journey that Bollywood’s made.