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We wonder whether what is portrayed by our heroes is actually what happens in real life? No way. For example, there is the story of two brothers who are separated at birth and meet when they are both grown up. Then they come to find they are brothers and the climax is when both meet, recognise each other, get married (not to each other but to suitably submissive bharatiya naris) and live happily ever after. Stranger than that is that of the story of two lovers who meet in their rebirth; they have the same faces and both remember their past life and are reunited in this birth after overcoming insurmountable odds.
These themes are repeated ad nauseam with variations and they have become so common that one can easily imagine the end of the picture while the movie is only half way through. It is a fact that truth is stranger than fiction but our Hindi films distort reality so that the extraordinary becomes commonplace. Therefore, even if the hero is living in abject poverty, he'll still find time to change into various designer outfits, all during the course of a five-minute song.
So our giggling gaggle of girls who crowd theatres for the latest Hrithik Roshan or Sharukh Khan blockbuster exit starry-eyed. Their image of the Indian male a la Bollywood is Brad Pitt meets Bruce Lee meets Albert Einstein meets Mahatma Gandhi meets Fred Astaire…… On a scale of one to ten, the hero is a 100. Of course, that wasn't always the case. Remember the sensitivity of the roles enacted by Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor or the young Dev Anand? How true to life they seemed?
So what do they actually get back on the college campuses, offices and colonies? The hard kick that reality packs. Weedy boys, pot-bellied men, leching and leering self designated God's gift to womankind, far removed from the Casanovas of the screen, who are, at the same time, perfect gentlemen and protectors of the virtue of the heroine. Most of them are interested in having a girlfriend after all otherwise they're counted for real losers and appearances matter. And, even if they do have their girlfriends and even if they vibe perfectly and even if they promise undying love and fidelity; even if they are, as the ad says, made for each other, those are minor considerations when it comes to making the final commitment. Things change once mummy and papa decide whom they actually get to marry. If the parents have an objection to the girlfriend, our real life hero will rather give in than revolt, and take seven rounds of the fire with the chosen one, who he's probably never laid eyes upon before.
I'm sure real life is very different from what is portrayed on the screen and unless this is exagerrted the audiences, who are masala addicts, would not like to sit through boring, mundane stuff everyday life is made of. So the reel life heroes are larger than real life.
But then that's what films are all about and that's just what Bollywood serves up large doses of - escapism. Run while you can in the dark, soothing environs of the theatre because a pretty disappointing reality may be waiting for you outside.
Anuradha is in the travel industry
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Are reel men for real? Of course not. They are just as big, two-dimensional, and transient as they appear on a 70mm screen or Chellywoodian cutouts that dot the high street of Chennai. These shadow men might evoke in us a sense of awe, empathy, identification or deja vu as the case may be, when the wily directors manage to strike some thin cord in our collective noodle-pack. The feelings may be real, but not the figures that evoke the feelings. Cinema is just an expensive and a bit unhygienic way of collective daydreaming with a few hundred smelly strangers.
Still many well-meaning people, sadly, get it all wrong. Thanks to fumbling flier Murphy, we now know why. Elementary folks, if a stick has a sticky end, some people always catch it by the sticky end. Simply put, if anything can go wrong it can. Doubt it. Please read the column opposite this one.
The trigger for this column was a recent report appeared in an archliberal British newspaper. Its India correspondent recently hinted that the Tamils collectively and secretly admire arch-Tiger Prabhakaran. He also hinted that two Tamil heroes have managed their business because of their resemblance to the stocky, brawny big-moustached Tiger. The correspondent admittedly got this impression from the way these heroes glare down from their cutouts. (It takes guts to sit through those action movies.) I would say it is a whole lot off that stuff my old-fashioned village neighbours use to purify things and others to simply as fuel or floor lining.
That a brawny Tamil is a rebel is a tiger is a movie hero is logic with missing links. While roaming about Chennai streets in a super-humid, sun-scorched afternoon, watching all those sun-tanned, brawny/wiry guys flit around on their Bullets, wearing just fluttering mundu and flip-flops, one can get such ideas. A profuse evening smell of all those marigold and jasmine from their women's put-up hair-dos is enough to complete the hallucination, unless, of course, you wipe it all down with a liberal dose of "mulahutanni" soup before sleep. Fantasia, "Poy". "Mayam"...
Then how did chief ministers, cult heroes come alive from the Tamil cinema? Elementary. They just did their film tricks in real life, not the other way round. I mean all those maudlin talk about us helpless people, and all that projection of the Messiah image we badly need. Any politician worth his salt knows that it is easy to imitate bits of Coolie/Hero/ Chachi No 1, play alternatingly avuncular, angry-young, comic hero and nice villain roles and strike some cords and gain a bit of admiration or identification. You speak to us front seat guys, who gape at your giant Eastman colour shadow on the screen, whistling, spitting, sighing, laughing, and occasionally throwing a knife for your safety when the villain crawls in from behind. We'll love you. You do a bit of heroism in real life - marry off poor girls, supply gallons of rice gruel in temples, throw flowers at election gatherings, or more imaginatively, sell cheap rice as another reel icon did in the neighbouring state. People expect wonders. Give us bread and circus.
Flashback to the reality debate. Do heroes imitate Prabhakaran? No. Why should someone imitate a real-life figure obsessed with bombing the life out of state leaders and snuffing out all dissenters within his ranks. The Tamils know belt-bombs are tasteless. They would rather chose bread-bombs, invented by canteen manager from a neighbouring state who used run the PTI canteen in New Delhi. The film stars, I am sure, would have a better taste for sex bombs.
Given the record of our real-life heroes I would any day prefer the unreal ones from cinema. Tell me, would you love the mellifluous "Tomorrow Ours" songs of a sword-wielding, chariot-racing screen hero or the hate talk of a chariot-racing real-life villain? Bread and circus, no idols and nukes. Thank you.
Max Martin writes on development issues and of late, international affairs. He is currently studying for a master's at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford
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