The Hindu Business Line : From news to movies

It’s a Wednesay. A grizzly, grey-haired man climbs to the top of an abandoned, half-constructed building in Mumbai, and spreads out his wares: laptops, cell phones (yes, in the plural) and other equipment with wires trailing. He punches in a number. The police commissioner’s cell phone rings. There are bombs planted in the city, the grey-haired man explains calmly. If what he wants doesn’t get done, the bombs will go off and lives will be lost.

Suddenly, it is no longer just any Wednedsay, It becomes A Wednesday, a 100-minute UTV film which toplines terror and its impact on citizens. What do you do when everything around you is going to pieces? If you are Naseerudin Shah, you take matters in your hands. You placate your annoyed wife, drink your tea, and then go off to blow up the bad guys — bearded and bearing Muslim names crowing about the recent terror attacks from Mumbai 1993 onwards, which have shaken the nation.

It’s only a film but it’s also a film about events that are happening with increasing frequency around us. Last week’s blasts in Delhi, the ones before that in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Jaipur: the horrific visuals of torn limbs and dripping blood played out in endless loops on 24-hour news channels suggest that we have become a nation held hostage by those who believe in spreading terror to get what they want.

Not one place seems safe or sacrosanct; Naseer places one of his deadly toys in a building just opposite the police HQ, and the irony wasn’t lost on the rows of policemen in the security detail accompanying Delhi chief minister Shiela Dixit, who was the chief-guest at the film’s premiere in the Capital.

Take a look at this year’s movies revolving around terror. In UTV’s Aamir, a liberal Muslim doctor is forced into doing the unimaginable by a shadowy don, who exhorts him to be ‘loyal to his people’. Mumbai Meri Jaan, also by the same production house, has a bigoted Hindu facing off a Muslim in a chai shop, and getting past his suspicion over a handful of prasad. This too-swift turnaround comes only after a graphic re-construction of the blasts in Mumbai’s local trains in 2006.

Ram Gopal Varma’s Contract looks at the nexus between the local mafia and off-shore terrorists; the hero joins a gang and saves Mumbai from being blown up.

Mani Shankar’s Mukhbir also has a similar theme and denoument. And Santosh Sivan’s Tahaan, released a couple of weeks ago, takes us to a Kashmir devastated by terror and brings us face to face with its purveyors.

The sudden spate of terror-themed movies coming out of Bollywood could just be the outcome of an industry looking around for stories which are about real people and real events. It could also be a new awareness of how terror, like romance, can be made instantly recognisable. In these movies, the bad guys are no fantastical Mogambo-like figures living in luxe dens of vice with molls draped over their laps.

The blasts from Bollywood’s past have changed into explosions, which ripple out in a quieter but much more menacing fashion. You don’t see the guys who plant the bombs in the trains, but you see the aftermath and you see how the rift between religious groups has become almost unbridgeable. Which is why you put your cynicism aside, and cheer when Kay Kay lets go of his dislike, albeit grudgingly, and makes a move towards that skull-capped ‘other’, and lifts Mumbai Meri Jaan to an emotive level. Who cares if it is naïve? This is the kind of India we want to see.

Naming names, as opposed to keeping things deliberately vague, can be tricky. In the early 1990s, Pakistan was named as an aggressor for the first time in the Aamir Khan starrer Sarfarosh. Before that it had always been that dreaded ‘foreign hand’ and that country ‘across the border’ (sarhad ke us paar).

The film took its startlingly ‘real’ feel from having the country’s name spoken aloud, as well as the dialogues between a patriotic Muslim cop and his Hindu superior officer making you overlook lead pair Aamir Khan and Sonali Bendre cavorting under a waterfall.

It’s taken more than 15 years to reach this stage, where no holds are being barred in the movies. The four terrorists of A Wednesday, whom Naseer wants released, are taken straight to their doom: he wants to blow them into smithereens, not his city which he and millions like him think is under permanent siege.

So is this what we should do? Take the law in our own hands and demolish those who think nothing of destroying us and who cannot be stopped by a weak, helpless State?

Is that the message we should be sending out to an already-agitated nation, busy counting its missing persons and mourning its dead?

These are tricky questions. And there are no one-size-fits-all answers. The only way we can watch these movies, and applaud them for their daring to break out of the formulaic dead zones of old Bollywood, is to watch them as films. Only films, which give us a point of view, and access to lives that we have no way of reaching otherwise.

shubhra.gupta@gmail.com