BARFI

Even if you have not seen the film, by now you must know that it is about a lovable kid who is called Barfi because his mother longed for a look alike of the boy featured in Murphy ads.  The mother promptly dies soon after giving birth to the boy: the film breaks the news in a pretty light vein.  Now the image of a boy in an ad is naturally deaf and dumb and for that matter devoid of all senses.  Barfi turns out to be merely deaf and dumb but quite lively otherwise.

The film is an attempt to take a leaf out of Raj Kapoor's book.  The film is even set in a period dating back several decades.  Barfi, born to a chauffeur, grows up to be a handsome boy who has little inhibitions in flirting with girls.  He manages to gatecrash into upper class parties as part of his chase.  Girls fall for him including an autistic one living away from her upper class family and spoilt parents.  She rediscovers Barfi on her way to her family residence as her grandfather lies on the deathbed.

The story continues to unfold in an enchanted fairyland where mothers still long for their lost love, and daughters don't bat an eyelid before walking out, empty handed, of a smooth well settled marriage for the sake of love.  This is a world where the hero has the guile to stage a kidnapping for the sake of money instead of simply asking for it.  And yet he doesn't have the faintest idea of exigencies and demands the exact amount of doctor's fee for ransom.  In this world a handicapped man with an empty pocket and an autistic girl without even so much as a change of dress elope together, ward off other derelicts who in this world limit themselves to just ogling, find employment and a roof in a metro while managing to retain their good looks and humor all the time.  Just to reassure the viewers that this world is part of the real one, there is a scene where the autistic girl demands assistance for doing "soo soo."

In this romantic world love alone triumphs.  Finally the hero gets old and haggard and gives up the ghost.  The autistic girl, though seemingly unaware of the death, lies down beside him and attains death (at will?)  A romantic dying together that will be remembered down the generations.

NB:  Once you have witnessed this strange world, our anxiety laden preparations for leisure travel and furious preparations for a relocation will look truly neurotic and insane. :)

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.