U Me Aur Hum, Halla Bol, Jimmy, Bombay to Bangkok, Tashan, Rama Rama Kya Hai Dramaa, Memsahab, Woodstock Villa, Mr. Black Mr. White, One Two Three, Sirf, Don Muthuswamy, Haal-e-Dil, Thoda Life Thoda Magic, Brahm, Dasavatar, Krazzy-4, Mere Baap Pehle Aap.
These were some of the absurdly titled flopped feature films produced by Bollywood — the world’s largest movie factory — in the first half of the current year ended June 30. They flickered ephemerally for a few hours on big and small screens across the country before being proclaimed financial disasters. Assuming that their production cost averaged Rs.15 crore — a modest investment these days in the movie business — Bollywood film producers lost a massive Rs.300 crore churning out pointless, plotless trash. According to Ziya Us Salam writing in The Hindu (July 11), only a handful of films — Race, Jannat and Jodha Akbar — were successful in recovering their investment.
It could be argued that contemporary Bollywood reflects a refreshing laissez faire culture in a society in which government controls are pervasive and that eventually, in the distant future, it will learn that the huge quantity of crass feature films it produces is no substitute for small-volume intelligent cinema. Yet given the mountains of cash that the quite patently brain-dead badshahs of Bollywood are losing hand over fist, the unwholesome influence cinema has on the television medium which is awash with titillating nautch-gana shows, and the disrepute they are bringing to the Indian film and entertainment industry as a whole, they could use some advice delivered gratis and in good faith. Because there’s no denying the potential of Indian cinema as a medium capable of driving socio-economic change.
Perhaps the most fundamental error of the film industry as a whole is that it can’t shed the belief that cinema is ‘time-pass’ entertainment — rather than a story-telling — medium. The clichéd, wafer-thin, cheap melodrama churned out ad nauseam by Bollywood and its regional clones in a society which offers legions of authentic stories of courage, hope and triumph of individuals against overwhelming odds of caste, creed, indifferent governments and ubiquitous anti-socials, is glaring testimony to the collective failure of precedent-obsessed Bollywood producers-directors to ride the evolutionary process of the cinematic medium. Against this backdrop of stasis, the oft-proclaimed aspiration of industry spokespersons to carve out an international market for the Indian film industry is laughable.
Cinema is a powerful medium and plays an important role as a mirror to society, containing within it the seeds of social reform. Therefore in the interest of society, it’s imperative that Bollywood and the Indian feature films industry as a whole grows up and stirs up a new genre of intelligent story-telling packaged as ‘infotainment’. In effect this means that novelists and scriptwriters who are peripheral extras in Bollywood studios, need to move to the heart of the film production process. If not, Indian cinema will continue the process of coarsening public sense and sensibility.