Week-end spl. for my friends...
What Indian film stories are all about over the past 6 or 7 decades...
Indian film stories are rehashed and flogged over and over again since decades, over three or four main themes with adds-on and embellishments here and there to make them palatable to the story-fatigued audience.
In a nutshell they are basically of two kinds: love stories and sagas of triumph of good over evil. These can be further sub-divided with dozens of permutations and combinations as you will now see.
- Love stories. A plain vanilla love tale is not very exciting and cannot be stretched for 3 hours, either. So the lovers have to be from unequal economic and/or social status in order to introduce a villain to throw a spanner in the work; the villain comes in various avatars, usually the affluent lover's parents cannot stomach a lower class/caste son/daughter-in-law or samandhi. If the lovers are of the same status, then the parents, usually the girl's, would seek out a rich spouse, and who else but the neighbourhood maaldaar, zamindar, even if he be much married or evil-personified. Or else, the lovers belong to camps, proud Thakurs vs. another high caste clan, who are sworn enemies for generations owing to caste/class considerations or to some family member from one side having eloped with one from the rival camp in the distant past creating an unforgivable deep rift, scar or slight. Or, it is the wicked, salivating village Thakur/zamindar who is eyeing the beautiful belle to make her his mistress. The trail blazers in this genre are the super-duper blockbusters Bobby, Ek Duje Ke Liye, Dilwale Dulhania, Saudagar
- a love triangle, two friends or foes loving the same boy or, usually, girl and in the end the more virtuous one rightfully getting his/her mate; if they are friends, one of them, usually the second lead, is the sacrificing kind and often shoots himself/herself to prove his/her worth as a pal (ye dosti hum nahin thodenge) and if s/he is the towering main lead (e.g. Dilip, Raj kapoor, Amitabh or Rajesh Khanna), s/he does the hara-kiri to garner all the sympathy of the viewers for himself/herself, e.g. Sangam, Muqqaddar Ka Sikkandar. Cinema pistols or hanjars are indeed judicious and unerringly know when and whom to kill!
- A hero and a mega villain (the Mogambo, Shakal, Gabbar Singh and other umpteen Amjad Khan/Amrish Puri characters). A minor mutant is dacoit sagas.
- Revenge or vendetta themes where the aggrieved one turns an angry young man (a role made famous by Amitabh in many of his blockbusters, of course there were others too like Anil Kapoor Sunny Deol) and takes on the might of the hoodlums and goons single-handedly. It is usually the same rotten kind, the hero after the villains that had removed his maa ka sindoor...
- The hackneyed family dramas with the usual all-too-predictable twists and turns and includes a most despicable kith or kin always scheming something sinister to mar the harmony and peace in the house. A minor variant is a tear-jerker, the Baghpan genre, where the kids themselves, after they grow up, turn evil and ill-treat their parents.
Whether good or bad, these kinds of movies or stories dealing with the shenanigans of a professional screen villain are things of the past.
- The lost found potboilers where brothers or identical twins get
separated in a village mela or in an accident or by a vengeful relative; if they are twins one becomes an honest, upright cop, and the other an outlaw, or one a super genius/intelligent and the other a bumbling idiot, and in the final reel, the siblings recognize each other and take on the maha villain who caused so much misery to the family, the final fight also consumes the life of the hitherto villainous sibling, after all, you see, a baddie is a baddie and has to pay the price. The late Manmohan Desai excelled in this genre and his classics included Amar Akbar Anthony, Naseeb (both with Amitabh in the lead) and Sachha Jhootha (Rajesh Khanna). Sometimes, the same song that they had sung together as kids miraculously reunites the long-separated siblings now grown-up, in the end (Yadon ki Baaraat). This kind has run its course, too.
- The latest is the sweet n sugary-all-things-nice variety, the Sooraj
Barjatya discovery, the video wedding from beginning to end, with all
characters oozing goodness and breaking into chorus music, dance and
laughter at every occasion. Most of the current day films especially those by Karan Johar fall into this category.
The examples cited are merely trail-blazers and there have been thousands of clones that tried to pull your heart strings and made mega
bucks.
The movie makers try to reinforce the age-old moral that good always triumphs over the evil in the end. In real life things do not happen that way - for example the king of crime Dawood still rules. In the film business too, many a thug who passes off as lilly-white producers, directors and artistes – barring honorable exceptions - do come to grief some day, financially ruined.
Maybe Indian films cannot be proud of originality even as we look up to Hollywood for inspiration and sustenance. It doesn't matter much.
Why bother too much about us being copycats? We do love our films as they provide thrills and frills to escape from our otherwise dreary daily life.
Supplements of mainline Indian newspapers and electronic media glowingly write/talk about the greatness of every Tom, Dick and Harry in Hindi or regional cinemas, but more often based on handouts from these worthies themselves. They are meant for the consumption of Bollywood crazy Indians, and don't believe a shred of it.
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