Mardani

Watched Mardani and found it entertaining.  Indian cinema has consistently been reinforcing the belief that systemic changes are not possible and the only resort available is personal heroics.  The heroics in Mardani are performed by the heroine, Rani Mukherjee.

Our heroine finally and physically prevails upon the villain running a human trafficking gang.  Thereupon the villain smiles and says, "Go ahead and beat me if it gives you any satisfaction for that is all that you can do:  This is India and people like me with the right connections always go scot-free in the end."  Surprisingly, the heroine acknowledges the observation as a fact and then hands over the bruised and defeated villain to his victims.  Then she walks away after making a loud observation that it is precisely for this reason that many criminals get subjected to "public outrage."  The victims beat the villain to death.

The chief minister of UP has much appreciated the film and exempted it from the hefty entertainment tax burden.  Is that an encouragement for using "public outrage" as the only available weapon against well connected criminals and an admission that government and law are helpless in the matter?

Paan Singh Tomar

Just finished watching Paan Singh Tomar (PST).  I had not anticipated the film to be good and kept on postponing watching it.  It has turned out to be a real good film and I recommend it without reservations.  The film beautifully brings out the the depravity of our system.  I depicts the individual greed so strongly built into our psyches, and the apathy and exaggerated self importance of our self-serving government machinery.  It sympathetically highlights the fact that faced with these callous elements the only option before an upright and straightforward citizen is to opt out and oppose the system despite an almost assured gloomy outcome.

The film is set in the era of 1950s, the time when foundations were being laid for the newly born Republic of India. Our traits shown in the movie persist to date unchanged, more or less.  The central character, PST, is a born athlete and joins the Indian army.  In an interview with his officers he proclaims the government to be immoral and a thief while showing great respect for the uprightness of the defense forces.  After an early retirement PST returns to his village where he is confronted by his avaricious cousin and a corrupt and indifferent government machinery.

I was abroad when the film was released.  I do not know if the film was promoted the way some recent imbecilic films like Bol Bachhan have been.  But if its collections have not been good it could only be due to lack of promotion as its name does little to suggest the brilliance of the movie.

A must watch movie.

A passing thought: We have all witnessed how the surface tension between defense and government on account of their perceived different traits has ultimately and unfortunately resulted in drawing defense closer to the government and not the other way round.  This is brought out by the defense establishment figuring prominently in some of the recent scams.  Look at some of our neighboring countries where the army has no such moralistic pretensions but has succeeded in keeping the political system subservient to it and under its thumbs!!

Ferrari Ki Sawari

Saw Ferrari Ki Sawari (FKS) today.  This time we waited till we could spot the symptoms of the film starting to detach itself from multiplexes:  Perhaps it is the other way round, the multiplexes preparing to discard a film which has been milked to capacity.  The symptoms are decreasing number of shows and shifting of these fewer shows to non-prime slots.  The wait stood us in good stead.  The hall was not too crowded and there were fewer distractions.

The film centers around a middle class Parasi family in Mumbai with a very mild tempered and highly principled bread-winner, an embittered grandfather and a very talented grandson.  The talented grandson has justifiable ambitions but the family does not have the financial resources to match those ambitions.  It is surprising to find the principled father stooping to stealing to somehow raise the requisite money.  Though finally everything turns out to be well and provides relief to audiences on the tenterhooks.  And, yes, before I forget, Sachin doesn't make an appearance in the film.  His Ferrari does and is acknowledged in the credits.

Yet another interesting character is a loud and outspoken Punjabi lady who is in the business of event management and happens to gets some business from a local trigger-happy neta and his spoilt young son.  She also uses her charm to gather all the good guys to help out the good guy - the doting father.

The script also beautifully portrays a remorselessly ambitious guys subscribing to the hook-or-the-crook principle, who never develops a sense of remorse and never grants concessions to the trampled victims even when doing so may be neither necessary nor gainful.  It reinforces the theory that nobody ever deviates from his genetically coded character, except rarely and temporarily as the good Parasi fellow happened to do to fulfill his son's ambitions.

Not a bad film and definitely worth watching once.

Rowdy Rathore

Musings on Rowdy Rathore

My wife and I recently watched Rowdy Rathore simply because we wanted to see a movie and there was little choice available.  Though we went on a normal weekday, we were a little surprised to find the hall nearly full.  We surmised that the reason must be the summer vacations.

The film is about a fearless Phantom-like supercop who takes on a powerful and wicked gangster single-handedly.  As the attributes of this character require it to be dignified, a look-alike is brought in to unleash rowdism.  The look-alike takes over from the supercop in the final stages of the battle after the latter is felled by a group that is much too large even for him.  Needless to add that finally the good prevails even though it has to be assisted by some rowdism - satyamev jayate.

The rowdyism displayed in the film conforms quite well to the dictionary meaning of the word rowdy - "An uncultured, aggressive, rude, noisy troublemaker."  But what really draw the applause from the audience are the super-heroic acts by the hero and finally by the look-alike.

Though the fascination for superheroes is universal it seems to be especially strong in the third world where might-is-right prevails in its crudest forms - Baapji is an example in the film we are talking about - and there are too many of them around us.  The villains in the developed world, as portrayed by their films, are a little different and appear in the form of greedy business tycoons and unscrupulous scientists or even aliens from outer space.  They are fewer in numbers but many times more powerful and require true supermen to take them on.  In our case, the capability to take on a few dozen people seems to be enough. But then unlike our developed counterparts, we need one such superhero for each locality and then every sphere of life in that locality.  The reason perhaps being a very high goon-density compared to the developed world.

Superheroes are needed for the simple reason that the normal mechanisms in a society prove inadequate to counter a threat facing the society as a whole or a subgroup of it. Most threats, excepts those from alien life forms, originate from within the society itself. Every society is like the ocean that was subjected to churning (samudra manthan) and like it a society too gives out both life sustaining nectar and life threatening venom.  Societies are only different from each other to the extent of the mix of these two opposites.  Some have more of the first while others may have more of the latter.  Better or more developed ones will have more of the nectar while the worse ones will have more venom pervading them.

However if your villains are confined to deviant businessmen or misguided brilliant scientists only, it shows that your systems are sort of okay and one needs to be a man of exceptional abilities to subvert the system.  But if your the systems are so weak or pervert that almost anyone could yield to the desire of being a tyrant in his / her own small or big way: everyone except those few who are cultured enough or genetically indisposed to such behavior, something must definitely be wrong with the way society has organized itself and chosen to govern itself.

But the fact remains that every society will have its own share of villains and weaknesses in the system, and hence its fantasies about supermen who could deliver it from these.

But the differences between their societies not withstanding, what the superheroes from first and third world have in common is their very human weakness for a sweetheart and this adds as much color to their stories and film scripts as the villainy of the villains.