Nationalists, Loyalists or Spoilers?

RRR (Telugu; 2022)
Director: S.S. Rajamouli

Week after week, this film seems to be roaring to greater heights at the box office. And the reviewers are going gaga over the offering from Tollywood and giving the Bollywood mafia and their chamchas a run for their money. The recent spate of blockbusters from the South cinema has evoked has started a Twitter war that may be related to the rekindling of the national language debate. RRR also reaffirmed the fact that the Baahubali duology was no flash in the pan.

In keeping with Baahubali's drift, RRR also threads along with big bucks on CGI and historical slunt. In RRR, the storytellers decided to create a fictional account loosely based on the lives and times of two freedom fighters from India.

Alluri Sita Rama Raju

Alluri Sitaram Raju (1897-1924) opposed the 1882 British Forest Act, which restricted movement in forests. It interfered with the tribals' practice of the 'slash and burn' style of farming (podu). The reason for the British legislation is to usurp the land for mining. Alluri used to ambush local police stations for British weapons to arm and lead his revolt against the colonialist. He grew up in Andhra Pradesh, gave up college, pursued spiritualism, found Christian evangelists annoying and found the purpose of life amongst the tribal people. He himself was not from the Adivasi community. After two years of terrorising the British, the British had to dig deep into their coffers with their special force to employ extreme measures to violate, kill and torture his sympathisers. Alluri was executed by a firing squad.

Komaram Bheem (1900-1940) is a member of the Gond tribe in the princely state of Hyderabad. He led an Anti-Nizamite rebellion in the 1930s against the monarch's feudal and oppressive Zamindar system. Restrictive regulations hampered the tribes' way of podu farming. Failure to comply with the state law saw brutal killings and forced amputations. In reality, the Nizam was just another British conspirator in the field of Indian who played lackey to the invaders, sold their motherland and continued to be immersed in the loot of yesteryears.

Komaram Bheem
© Praveen Kumar Myakala

After failing peaceful negotiation, Bheem went underground, linked up with the Communist Party and created an Adivasi guerilla army to protect their lands. It took the British, all its local police, and local turncoat Muslim aristocrats (taluqdars) to capture him in an ambush. Bheem's battle cry was 'Jal Jangal Zameen' (Water, Jungle, Land). [Note: Jangal = Jungle; another Anglicised Indian word.]

 

In reality, Bheem and Alluri Raju probably never met. With the creative artistic licence, the storyteller portrayed Bheem as the protector of the Gond going under disguise in search of a young girl appropriated by the British Governor's wife just because she could do beautiful hand painting. Raju is seemingly an obedient British bulldog scurrying around doing his Master's dirty job. Unbeknownst to anyone, Raju holds a dark secret. His father died fighting the British, and Raju has big plans to sabotage the British and defeat them at their own game.

The plan sees Bheem and Raju finally discovering each other's identity, and after many mind-boggling and gravity-defying acrobatic aerial fights, the heroes come out victorious. Bheem unites the abducted girl with her mother, and Raju smuggles British guns to the revolutionaries.

It is a question of whether one is a nationalist, a loyalist or a collaborator. A nationalist may be one who does everything to preserve the honour and dignity of his flag. A loyalist is loyal to whom - his country, his paymaster, the powerful, race, religion? The list goes on as schism amongst the population becomes more acute. The nationalist may look at someone who works against his interest as a collaborator. At the height of the rein of their empire upon which the sun never set, the British were master planners in planting collaborators amongst their subjects. During the pre-Independence era, in and outside India, the British successfully planted informants among the rank and file of the RSS movement and the Gaddar movement in the USA to thwart their planned ambushes and mutinies. In fact, Chandra Bose and Homi Bhabha's mysterious air crashes are said to have British handiwork written all over them.

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For the car chase

Bullitt (1968)
Now, the scene that everyone remembers of this movie is definitely the legendary street car chase of the undulating streets of San Francisco. This almost 9minutes car chase looked so real as if the viewers are actually seated in the car that is driven. Essentially, it marks the watermark of how car chases should be filmed!
Naturally the Ford Mustang GT must have seen good sales that year. It must have created such an impression that the company decided to remake the model in 2008, all similar in shape and sound of the engine as well.

The problem was that the earlier 1968 model had a carburettor whilst the 2008 one had fuel injection system. The manufacturers wanted the new car to sound old! And the sounds produced in the film was mixed with racing car sounds. Furthermore, the law does not allow cars to emit such loud sounds on the road. So they used sound technology to tweak the columns in the exhaust to attain near perfect replica.

Ford Mustang GT 1968

Macho man Steve McQueen stars as a tough cop trying to protect a star witness. The DA (Robert Vaughn) gets hot on his trail when the witness gets shot at together with a cop who was assigned to keep vigil. Hence starts a cat and mouse chase against time to sort out the crime and to find the truth.

The eyes see what it wants to see..

Dil Dhadakne Do (Hindi, Let the Heart Beat; 2015)


Everyone looks at something and sees what he wants to see. On surface, it looks like a usual Bollywood fare of forced marriage, forbidden love with the take home message of love conquers all. Scratch a little deeper, you would realise that there are more that meets the eyes than the eye candy costume, beau stars and the catchy hip gyrating foot tapping songs.

DDD is a story of a self made entrepreneur, Kamal Mehra, his wife, Neelam who are both celebrating their thirtieth wedding anniversary on a Mediterranean cruise with their friends and relatives. The celebratory function is an avenue to showcase their wealth to show people that they have arrived. The wife feels that the marriage is nothing more than an empty shell. Kamal is busy making money and have other ideas about social life. The daughter, Ayesha (Priyanka Chopra) is trapped with a husband (Manav Sangha, Rahul Bose) after the love of her life (Sunny Gill, Farhan Aftar) was conveniently packed off to study in USA. The son, Kabir, (Ranveer Singh), feel small and cannot fit into his father's big boots. At the same time, Kamal and Neelam plan to get Kabir to hitch up with a potential business partner's daughter so as to ease business.
With that big baggage, the family and friends start the 10 day cruise.

The Indian diaspora has spread the world over and there is no place Indians have not seen, at least on the silver screen. Till very recent, Switzerland remained a place every true blooded Indian wanted to be but most movies from the Indian sub-continent  have overkilled the desire by making way too many dream scenes there! So, this time around it was on a cruise around Mediterranean and Turkey.

Hell broke loose albeit in a light hearted manner as love goes awfully wrong. Cupid starts shooting arrows at the wrong couple. Kabir falls in love with a Muslim dancer (Farah, Anushka Sharma). Ayesha demands divorce and Kamal has the bear the brunt of years of neglect of his domesticated wife.

As I was saying, different viewers will take home different cues from the movie. The youngsters and the young at heart will feel triumphed as the parents gave in to the pressures of the young love. Despite the religious and class differences, young love won. Those trapped in mundane uninteresting marriages or even uneventful marriages would feel that there is a need to be liberated from the shackles of societal expectations and stereotypes. Some how they would feel that there is something wrong in our family dynamics. Perhaps, they forget that the equation changes when an offspring shows up.

The older generation would see that they have been a slave of the system. They slog to escape the clutches of poverty to elevate themselves up the rung of social class only to realise that their endeavours all these while have come to naught. Their offspring do not share the same fire in their belly. Money and desire to accumulate wealth does not mean much to them. Perhaps they forget that they have been influenced by the media of the socialist societies where the state cares for you. Here, in a third world country, every man is on his own! Have they been wrong to think that their sole purpose in life was to improve living conditions of the elders and their dependants just like how their fathers singlehandedly put dinner on the table and with his meagre minimal earning wages educated, fed, dressed and cared for the family years ago?

N.B. I initially thought the family was Muslim. With names like Kamal, Kabir, Ayesha, Noorie, Manav, I cannot be penalised. Amir Khan gives a voiceover to the family dog, Pluto, who seem to be the narrator who pokes fun at the double faced nature, double speak and contradiction of the human race.