The Bollywood Story

Lakshya, released two weeks before, has been declared a flop (failure) at the Indian Box Office. When I got to know this, it filled me up with a mixed feeling of rage, disgust and incomprehension. It was a genuinely good movie, a movie which stuck to a passionate storyline, had more than reasonable amounts of the typical Indian entertainment elements, and sought to innovate with a modern cinematographic approach, blended almost uniquely with youthful and passionate direction.

How much has Bollywood evolved? Or has it? For me, the progress has been digressive. From what I have personally observed, the basic fundamentals of moviemaking have given way to surface level masala formulas as the priority objects in the minds of the populist film-makers. There has been certain progress in the field of Technical Wizardry, most noticeably in the fields of Video Editing and Audio Mixing, but Technology will always be a tool, it's only as good as the beholder.

In Devdas, the two most prolific actresses of modern Bollywood, Aishwarya Rai and Madhuri Dixit danced in authentic Indian dresses, in perfect, much practiced synchronization to the digitally enhanced music performed by the most trained choir of Artisans; they danced at the largest sets ever built for an Indian movie, for the costliest Indian movie ever built. It was admittedly a visual spectacle.

But they never even came close to challenge the aura of the moment, when an indignant Prithviraj raised his head to see a thousand Madhubalas, dancing in contempt of the emperor, and in love of the prince. It was one of the very first colored songs in Indian movies; and he dance was hardly a practiced routine, rather an innate swinging. But it defined, for me, the best that Indian Cinema has ever produced.

I believe Indian cinema started out as a vibrant artform, where the protagonists were ready to experiment, but lay strongly on the fundamentals, but somewhere down the line, more in the recent years, it became a business. There's nothing wrong in that, just that this brings in the astute businessman perspective to the trade. Hence Actors are now children of movie entities, or models with fulsome bodies; the stories can be finished in a single page; and direction is done by part time producers, or their kin.

Where am I going with this, I don't know. But it's just disappointing to see that such a rich history of soul is followed by a pile of candyfloss.