“PK” - Rajkumar Hirani (2014)

Rajkumar Hirani’s PK (2014) is a comedic sci-fi fantasy that offers a light-hearted comparative look at religious practices and dogmas in India.  Given India’s many staunchly-held religious sects, this is a somewhat risky subject area for an Indian filmmaker to enter into, but Hirani managed successfully to fashion a film that poked some fun, yet still avoided much controversy.  The film was favourably received by most critics, both in India and internationally [1,2,3,4], and it was a hit at the box office.  In fact when it was released, PK emerged as the highest-grossing Indian film of all time, and it still ranks as one of India’s highest grossing films ever [5].

Rajkumar Hirani, who directed, edited, and co-produced this film, also teamed up with Abhijat Joshi to write the script for PK.  Joshi and Hirani had earlier co-scripted Hirani’s previous film, 3 Idiots (2009), which had also taken a satirical look at a social issue, on that occasion concerning educational practice, and which was also a big hit.

Another common feature of PK and 3 Idiots was the appearance of popular lead actor Aamir Khan, who here plays the title role.  Khan has appeared in a number of films that display his dancing ability, but here in PK he is also given a chance to show off his well-sculpted physique.

The story of PK concerns an alien astronaut (played by Aamir Khan) from a far-off planet who is stranded on Earth because he has lost his means of returning to his spaceship.  Although he looks like a human being (apart from his bug-eyed countenance and protruding ears), he knows nothing about human practices and culture.  In particular, he doesn’t know how to talk – on his planet they communicate by direct mental transmission of thoughts when they hold each others’ hands.  And also on his planet the people there don’t wear any clothing

So at the start of the film, when the alien first drops down from his large spaceship in an open area somewhere in Rajasthan, he is naked, except for a bejewelled ornamental medallion around his neck.  This supposed medallion is actually a vital remote communication device that the alien needs to communicate with his spaceship, but it is quickly stolen by the first human that the alien encounters.  So immediately the alien is alone and stranded on this new planet.  As the alien encounters other humans, his odd (to them) behaviour causes them to assume that he is drunk, and so they start calling him “PK”, which when pronounced phonetically signifies the Hindi word for ‘tipsy’.

Very quickly and without explanation, though, the film shifts to a flashback in Belgium involving  ordinary humans.  There two Indian students, Jagat "Jaggu" Janani Sahni (played by the beautiful Anushka Sharma) and Sarfaraz (Sushant Singh Rajput), meet and fall in love.  But Jaggu is an Indian Hindu and Sarfaraz is a Pakistani Muslim, so when Jaggu’s tradition-bound father learns about their affair, he is alarmed. After consulting self-satisfied Indian god-man Tapasvi Maharaj (Saurabh Shukla), who claims to divine that Sarfaraz will betray Jaggu, her father expresses his opposition to their proposed immediate marriage.  But Jaggu and Sarfaraz go ahead with their plans anyway.  However at the actual marriage registration event, Jaggu is stood-up and left broken-hearted.  She returns to India alone and starts working as a TV reporter.

So now we move back to the “present time” and have two main narrative threads in the film: PK’s story and Jaggu’s story.  These are quickly linked up when the enterprising TV reporter Jaggu, looking for an interesting story for her show, hears about PK, who by this time is a clothed, but weird, vagrant.  He is now able to talk like a human and is wandering the streets in futile search of his missing remote device.  Noone believes PK is an alien astronaut; they just assume he is tipsy.  But Jaggu finds his weirdness likely of interest to her TV audience.  Eventually she tracks PK down and manages to interview him while he is briefly locked up in a jail cell, where PK gives her his account, dramatized in flashback, of things that have happened to him since his arrival on Earth. 

One of the interesting things that PK tells her is how he learned to talk.  Initially the mute PK was trying to hold onto the hands of people he met, hoping by this means to communicate with them in his fashion, but this was always met with hostility, particularly when he tried this with women.  Eventually, though, he is befriended by a bandmaster, Bhairon Singh (Sanjay Dutt), who feels guilty after having accidentally run into PK with his truck.  Singh tries to make PK happy and finally takes him to a brothel, hoping that will loosen him up.  But PK spent the whole night just holding onto a prostitute’s hands, and by doing so, he was able to “download” everything in her mind.  The next morning he could talk, and he suddenly knew lots about human life and culture.  Then he was able to accelerate his quest to find out how to get home.

This is the point in the film when things start to get interesting.  When PK queried people he would meet on the street, many of them told him that only God could help him.  But who was God and how could He be reached?  As PK investigated this matter further, he discovered there were a number of different stories about who this mysterious God was, and these stories were detailed by certain “managers” (i.e. clerics) who each asserted that they had privileged access to the truth.  PK sincerely tries to practice a number of these religions – including Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, Islam, and Christianity – but he only gets confusion and nowhere to his ultimate goal.

After telling this tale about his experiences to Jaggu, PK eventually convinces her that he really is an alien and that he is telling the truth.  So she vows to help him find his remote device so that he can return to his home planet. 

At this time also, PK learns that when humans dial telephones, they sometimes get the wrong number.  And so he conjectures that the various god-men that he has encountered or heard about have been trying to connect to God, but they have just gotten the “wrong number” – they haven’t connected with the real God.  When Jaggu hears PK offer his “wrong number” theory about the god-men, she gets excited that the idea will click with the public, and so she conveys the notion to her TV audience.  The public’s enthusiasm about PK’s wrong-number notion upsets god-man Tapasvi Maharaj, and this eventually leads Jaggu to arrange for a TV debate between Tapasvi Maharaj and PK about the validity of the latter’s wrong-number idea. 

The ensuing TV debate is a dramatic highlight of the film, because it offers a succinct comedic showcase and summation of the questions about religious dogma that have been presented in the film.  In the debate, PK has the opportunity to contrast the difference between the admittedly unknowable God that created us all with the artificial and limited “god” that the dishonest Tapasvi Maharaj had concocted (as well as with the similar artificial “gods” that other god-men hucksters have invented). 

Of course there are some other dramatic aspects of this story that I haven’t mentioned and that you can discover.  For example, the clever but innocent PK falls madly in love with Jaggu.  In addition Jaggu’s earlier beloved, Sarfaraz, reappears on the scene, and his alleged matrimonial betrayal is reconsidered.  So there are still some questions that have to be answered.  For example:

• Who does Jaggu wind up with?
• Will PK retrieve his remote device?
• Will PK remain on Earth or return to his native planet?

See the movie, and find out the answers to these questions for yourself. 

From an overall perspective, we can identify several virtues of the film PK.  For example, the musical numbers are entertaining, and the dancing is well done – particularly the energetic dancing on the part of Aamir Khan and Anushka Sharma.  And the acting performances are generally okay.  I was particularly charmed by Anushka Sharma’s engaging screen persona.  But there were also some elements of the film didn’t quite add up for me. 

One issue that I had with the film concerned basic realism.  Of course we know that in a sci-fi-tinged fantasy, there are going to be some inevitable compromises with realism.  But still there were some unrealistic elements that stood out for me.  One of them concerned the aliens’ ability to vocalize.  PK says that they don’t know how to talk on his alien planet; they communicate there by hand-holding. And yet we soon see that they have evolved to have vocal cords like we humans.  It seems odd that they would never have naturally evolved the ability to speak vocally on their planet.  (Later, PK downloads human knowledge from the prostitute and can then speak like us.) 

Another minor quibble I have that screenwriter Hirani could have easily avoided is when PK says his planet is four billion miles away from Earth.  But the nearest star to our sun (and hence the nearest candidate solar system that could have life forms) is about 25 trillion miles away.     

And although Aamir Khan puts a lot of energy into his role as PK, I found his performance to be too goofy for me to empathize with.  His clown-like, bug-eyed mugging was too much of a distraction on this occasion.

On the whole, though, this film PK does successfully manage to take a light-hearted look at a potentially volatile social phenomenon – religious hypocrisy.  This is something that infects all religions to varying degrees.  And it can occur when presumed managers or authorities of the religion mistakenly assert that they have direct contact with their god and are authorized to proclaim his teachings, when in fact they may have, to put it in PK’s terms, just "dialled the wrong number”.  As PK suggests, the mysteries behind our being and world of experience are probably deeper and more profound than many of these doctrines would suggest.  Our best advice for this time of world crisis may be simply to spread our love as far as possible – even to those beings, alien or otherwise, we may encounter in the future.

★★★

Notes:

1. Rachel Saltz, “Appealing to God, a Disoriented Space Alien Hopes There’s Help Out There”, The New York Times, (19 December 2014).   
2. Martin Tsai, “Review:  Bollywood musical ‘PK’ a radical film in extraterrestrial guise”, Los Angeles Times, (21 December 2014).   
3. Edmund Lee, “Film review: Bollywood’s PK sees alien search for remote control and god”, South China Morning Post, (2 September 2015).   
4. Meeta, “PK”, WithOut Giving the Movie Away, (n.d.).   
5. “List of highest-grossing films in India”, Wikipedia, (18 March 2020).   

“3 Idiots” - Rajkumar Hirani (2009)

3 Idiots (2009) is an immensely popular college comedy-drama that was very well received by the critical community [1,2,3,4,5,6] and has won numerous awards both in India and abroad [7].  Directed by Rajkumar Hirani and scripted by Hirani, Abhijat Joshi, and Vidhu Vinod Chopra, the story of the film is loosely based on Chetan Bhagat’s novel Five Point Someone (2004).  In addition, 3 Idiots features a compelling performance by popular lead actor Aamir Khan in the lead role.  The story of 3 Idiots concerns what happens to three students who meet and become friends after being initially assigned to room together as students at the prestigious Imperial College of Engineering in Delhi (ICE). 

Although the film spends much of its time wallowing in the throes of sometimes vulgar screwball comedy, there is also some narrative width to the plot, and this may expand the film’s appeal for some viewers.  In particular, there is a thoughtful thematic element concerning how best to educate students and the current deficiencies of educational systems in general.  These educational system deficiencies, I should add, are not only present in India, but are characteristic of educational systems at all levels all over the world.

The three students who meet at ICE, i.e. the “3 Idiots”, have all been sent there by their hopefully ambitious parents to study engineering. They are:

• Ranchoddas "Rancho" Shamaldas Chanchad (played by Aamir Khan).  This personage will be identified with two other characters in the story, and this mistaken-identity element will add a fascinating twist to the narrative.
         
• Farhan Qureshi (played by Madhavan)
   
• Raju Rastogi (Sharman Joshi)

In addition to those 3 Idiots, there are three other characters who have prominent roles in the story:

• Chatur Ramalinga (Omi Vaidya) is also an engineering student at ICE.  He is very smart, but he is from Tamil-speaking Pondicherry and so is not very conversant in Hindi.
   
• Dr. Viru Sahastrabuddhe (Boman Irani), called “Virus” by the students, is the strict and domineering director of ICE.
   
• Pia Sahastrabuddhe (Kareena Kapoor) is Virus's younger daughter and is studying medicine to become a doctor.   She will become the object of Rancho’s romantic interests in the story.

With this mix we can discern five narrative threads that drive what happens in the film.

1. The Idiots vs. Virus 
   Virus is a doctrinaire college director who lives according to a rigid schedule and seems to want all his students to be submissive robots.  The 3 Idiots, led by Rancho, are, in contrast, rebellious and free-spirited.  So Virus naturally sees them as enemies in need of punishment.
      
2. Rancho vs. Chatur Rancho and Chatur are natural rivals.  Both are smart, but they embody fundamentally contrasting ways to learn.
    
3. Rancho and Pia
   Rancho and Pia are, on the surface, an unlikely duo.  But their natural attractiveness and spark, as well as adventitious narrative circumstances, bring them together.
     
4. Farhan and his family
   Farhan comes from a middle-class family, and his strict father is determined to see to it that his son graduates from ICE with an engineering degree.  But Farhan’s real passion is wildlife photography, which is a far less lucrative profession.
    
5. Raju and his family
   Raju’s family is desperately impoverished, and their only hope is for Raju to graduate from ICE and get a good job.  The possibility that he might fail in this effort makes the sensitive Raju suicidal at one point.

The film begins in the “present”, ten years after the initial events in this story, when Farhan, Raju, and Chatur meet up at ICE and are looking for Rancho, whom they haven’t seen in years.  They get a clue that Rancho may be in Shimla, up north of Delhi, so they head out on the road to look for him. Then the focus shifts to ten years earlier when Rancho, Farhan, and Raju met as freshmen at ICE.  There they are faced with the demanding academic requirements and social structure that new ICE students must face.

Right away it is clear that Rancho is a creative iconoclast who continually comes up with novel ways to look at things and solve problems.  And, of course, his ways don’t sit well with Virus, which presents numerous comedic opportunities in this part of the film.

At one point the mischievous boys are looking for good food and crash a wedding party, which just happens to be for Virus’s older daughter, Mona Sahastrabuddhe (Mona Singh).  At the party Rancho meets Mona’s pretty younger sister, Pia, who is a medical school intern at a city hospital.  The two of them engage in witty banter, and we can guess that this is not the last time we will see the two of them together.

Later Chatur has to give an honorary speech on a college celebration day, but since he doesn’t know Hindi very well, he needs to memorize the whole text.  Unfortunately for him, his rival Rancho has made a few off-color modifications to the text he has to memorize, which turns the speech into a hilarious expression of ribaldry.  After Chatur’s embarrassing experience he challenges Rancho to meet him ten years later and see which one of them is more successful (and it is this hoped-for meeting that is shown at the start of the film).

Critical medical emergencies occasion some further encounters involving Pia and Rancho, including one saving Raju’s father, who is desperately ill, and one providing emergency assistance for the delivery of sister Mona’s baby.  Each of these desperate occasions combine Pia’s medical know-how and Rancho’s engineering inventiveness to bring about a last-second rescue.  Later, after a fraternal drinking bout, Rancho’s two pals goad their inebriated friend into sneaking into Pia’s bedroom and declaring his love for her. 

Finally, after further madcap adventures, the three idiots manage to graduate, with Rancho placing at the top of the class.  But after the graduation ceremony, Rancho disappears, and Farhan and Raju lose sight of their friend.   This brings us up to the scene shown at the outset of the film when Farhan, Raju, and Chatur went off on a drive to find Rancho.  They pick up Pia along the way, and they do eventually find Rancho.  But there are further issues to be addressed and unravelled, including just who is Rancho – his real identity has been a mystery.  Nevertheless, the film does end on a high comedic note and with all five narrative threads resolved in a satisfactory manner.


There are several dimensions along which we can take a look at 3 Idiots with respect to its overall virtues and vices.  On the production side of things, I liked the music, particularly the songs and the associated elaborate and exuberant choreography of “Aal Izz Well” (“All Is Well”) and “Zoobie Doobie”.  On the other hand, the acting was generally exaggerated and artificial, particularly the over-heated ham-acting performance of Boman Irani in the role of Virus.  The only saving grace on this front was the spirited performance of Aamir Khan as Rancho, which drives the film all the way.

A further detriment to the film, from my perspective anyway, was the relentless recourse to juvenile locker-room humor.  There are frequent references to and depictions of male farting and peeing, with the latter act sometimes used to defile the property of a despised superior.  In addition there are a number of instances of collective mooning – where some boys pull down their pants and expose their backsides to someone to whom they either wish to give an insult or to pay self-deprecating obeisance.  This kind of stuff may be considered to be hilarious by some teenagers, and it may help account for the film’s great popularity, but to me it was just foolish.

However, an offsetting positive element to the film was the delicate way the initially tentative romance between Pia and Rancho was presented and allowed to blossom.  This had a realistic feel to it that helped the viewer buy in to everything else that was going on and so increased overall enjoyment.

The most significant positive aspect of 3 Idiots, though, as I mentioned earlier, was its serious addressing of an important issue in society: how to educate people.  This is a critical concern not only for India, but for the whole world.  In this respect the conventional way to teach people is to get them to learn facts and then see if the  students can remember these facts when they are examined.  This is how ICE, as led by Virus, operated in this story. 

But we must be aware that there are actually two kinds of knowing – knowing what and knowing how.  Knowing what can be referred to as “knowledge”, and knowing how can be referred to as “skill” [8,9].  Knowledge can be written down in textual form and then memorized.  Skill, on the other hand, can only be learned by doing.  You don’t learn how to ride a bicycle from a textbook; you must get on a bicycle and learn how to do it, yourself. 

Both knowledge and skills are important to learn, but most educational institutions just concentrate on teaching knowledge.  Why?  Because knowledge is so much easier and more economical to teach.  For teaching knowledge, one can have a lecturer stand before a large class of students and present factual knowledge to them all simultaneously.  And, of course, in the Internet age of today, these economies of scale for knowledge teaching have drastically increased.  But to teach a skill, the teacher must often have a one-on-one interaction with the student. 

In addition, it is so much easier to examine students for their knowledge and then rank them precisely.  Measuring and ranking skills, on the other hand, is much more difficult.  So educational institutions the world over have opted to concentrate their focus on teaching knowledge.  But knowing skills – in particular (a) knowing how to work together as a team and (b) knowing how disparate objects and tools may work together to generate a synergistic effect – are crucially important and should not be left out of the educational curriculum.

This knowledge-vs-skills issue is directly addressed in 3 Idiots.  Virus represents the exclusive focus on knowledge, while Rancho represents and embodies the virtues of thinking in a skills-oriented way.  This distinction is well demonstrated on many occasions in the film.  Chatur bases his study on rote learning – he memorizes everything, but he doesn’t have a deep understanding of things.  Rancho, on the other hand, uses his more intuitive engineering know-how and teamwork instincts to help solve many real-world problems in this story.  Chatur gets good grades, but Rancho is the better student and the one we want to emulate.
  
So at the end of the film, we see Rancho (but now with his correct identity, Phunsukh Wangdu) teaching young people, via physical demonstrations and interactions, the way things work.  He is helping them to develop needed skills.  And that is the message we need to take home [8].
★★★

Notes:

1. Shubhra Gupta. “3 Idiots”, Indian Express, (25 December 2009).   
2. Nikhat Kazmi, “3 Idiots Movie Review”, Times of India, (11 April 2016).  
3. Gaurav Malani, “3 Idiots: Movie Review”, Times of India, (24 December 2009).   
4. Lisa Tsering, “3 Idiots -- Film Review”, Hollywood Reporter, (29 December 2009).   
5. David Chute, “Aamir Khan’s College Comedy, 3 Idiots”, The Village Voice, (9 February 2010).   
6. Robert Abele, “‘Idiots’ team for jolly mayhem”, Los Angeles Times, (29 January 2010).   
7. “List of accolades received by 3 Idiots”, Wikipedia, (20 January 2020).   
8. Martin K. Purvis, Maryam A. Purvis, & Christopher Frantz “CKSW: A Folk-Sociological Meta-Model for Agent-Based Modelling”, Computational Social Science and Social Computer Science: Two Sides of the Same Coin (Social Path 2014), University of Surrey, UK (2014).   
9. The Film Sufi, “‘Moneyball’ - Bennett Miller (2011)”, The Film Sufi, (8 August 2012).   

“Dangal” - Nitesh Tiwari (2016)

Dangal (meaning: “Wrestling Competition”; 2016) is an immensely popular sports drama that has set box-office records both in India and abroad [1,2].  Directed by Nitesh Tiwari and featuring Indian superstar Aamir Khan in the lead role, the film was also produced by Aamir Khan, along with Kiran Rao and Siddharth Roy Kapur.  The script for the film, which was developed by Tiwari, Piyush Gupta, Shreyas Jain, and Nikhil Meharotra, is loosely based on the true story of how an ordinary man from north India (Haryana) managed to train his two daughters to become world-class wrestlers in India’s traditionally male-dominated society. 

Thanks perhaps to several aspects of the film which I will discuss below, Dangal has been an enormous success and has earned more than US$ 300 million at the box office, making it the highest-grossing Indian film of all time [3].  This commercial success has come in spite of efforts by the BJP and other nationalist elements of the right-wing establishment to boycott the film because of their protests against Aamir Khan’s humanism [4].  As I mentioned as part of my review of Khan’s Taare Zameen Par [5]:

“. . . Khan, himself, has over the course of his career not only gained much fame for his roles in high-grossing films, such as 3 Idiots (2009) and Dangal (2016), but, in addition, has also drawn considerable attention for his activities outside the cinema in connection with his support of humanitarian causes and as a social critic.  As a Muslim man married to a Hindu woman (Kiran Rao), Aamir Khan has sought to bridge social divides in India and has expressed in this connection some criticism of sectarian activities on the part of Norendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Gujarat.  This has led to personal attacks from Hindu nationalists, who have organized boycotts of Khan’s films.  Nevertheless, Khan remains one of the most popular figures in Indian cinema.”

The story of Dangal concerns a man, Mahavir Singh Phogat (played by Aamir Khan), who was a champion amateur pehlwani wrestler as a young man.  However, his father coerced him into giving up wrestling and instead concentrate on getting a normal job and raising a family.  This was something that Mahavir agreed to do, but he always regretted sacrificing his sports career and the honors that he could have attained.

Note that one of the interesting production details of Dangal that fascinates many viewers concerns the weight changes that Aamir Khan underwent during the shooting of this film.  Since he plays a role of an athletic person, Mahavir Singh Phogat, who is seen in the film at various ages over some twenty-five years or so, Khan chose to depict Mahavir’s gradually aging physiognomy by putting on his own real body weight.  This meant that Khan had to gain some 30 kg and weigh a total of 98 kg in order to perform the role of the more aged Mahavir, who is shown for the bulk of the screen-time.  This is a lot for someone as short as Khan, who is only 168 cm (5 feet, 6 inches) tall.  So viewers see a number of different versions of Aamir Khan over the course of this film.

Anyway, as the story moves forward, Mahavir gets a routine job, gets married, and hopes to raise a son that can be a wrestling champion.  When his wife gets pregnant, he prays for a boy, but the newborn turns out to be a girl.  Given India’s patriarchal society, Mahavir’s neighbors all assume that he wants a son simply because that’s the traditionally preferred gender in India.  So they offer him all sorts of superstitious prescriptions that are supposed to guarantee the delivery of a boy.  But none of these formulae work, and three more daughters are born but no sons.  Finally Mahavir gives up on his quest for a son and abandons his dream of raising a wrestling champion.

But years later, when Mahavir learns that his two older daughters, Geeta (played at this age by Zaira Wasim) and Babita (Suhani Bhatnagar), have beaten up two boys who had taunted them, he revives his long-held dreams of family glory.  Now, instead of a son, he will raise his two girls to be female wrestling champions.

Mahavir establishes a harsh training regimen for the girls, forcing them to get up every day at five in the morning and engage in heavy-duty calisthenics, long-distance running, and strength-building exercises.  He also sets up a makeshift wrestling pit outside his home and relentlessly teaches them wrestling moves that they will need in future competitions.  In order to make his daughters more efficient and less likely to be distracted by girly concerns, he forces Geeta and Babita to have their hair cut very short into crewcut form and to wear (uncharacteristically for Indian girls, especially for the small town in which they reside) boys’ shorts and shirts.

The first half of the film shows the gruelling training and development of the two girls, and it eventually results in Geeta winning some junior championships at the state and national levels.  But Mahavir is relentlessly ambitious, and he wants her to win an international championship medal.  In order to represent India in such a competition, though, Geeta (now somewhat older and played by Fatima Sana Shaikh) must attend the National Sports Academy in Patiala for training.  The immediate goal is to win a medal in the upcoming Commonwealth Games.

This sets up the narrative conflict of the second half of the film, because now Geeta is to leave her home and be trained by a national coach, Pramod Kadam (Girish Kulkarni).  Kadam’s wrestling philosophy and teaching are completely different from Mahavir’s, and the two men take an instant dislike for each other.  Both men are seeking glory for themselves, and their instrument, over whom they jealously compete, is poor Geeta. 

Mahavir tries to pass his own instructions to Geeta at the academy by various means, and the jealous Kadam takes steps to block his interference.  Finally, we get to the Commonwealth games, themselves, and a number of wrestling matches are shown in remarkably graphic and realistic detail. 

With Mahavir shouting his own competing instructions to Geeta from his audience seat, she keeps winning and makes it to the championship match for the gold medal.  But Kadam still sees Mahavir’s instructions to Geeta as harmful interference, and he manages to have Mahavir misled into getting locked into a closet below the arena for the final match.  Now on her own and seemingly outmatched by her powerful opponent, Geeta nevertheless manages to remember her absent father’s instructions just at the critical moment.  It all makes for a very dramatic ending, and she becomes the first Indian female wrestler ever to win a gold medal at the Commonwealth Games [6].


There are some undeniable virtues of Dangal, notably the acting and the vivid staging and filming of the wrestling activities.  In particular the sensitive acting of Fatima Sana Shaikh is exceptional.  Aamir Khan’s performance is good, too, but I think there was a little too much emphasis placed on his role as Mahavir – it might have been a bit better to ration some of his relentless scowling and grimacing here.  

However, the great popularity of Dangal is probably primarily due to three narrative factors [1]:

• An Underdog Sports Drama
• Nationalistic Pride
• A Feminist Perspective

So let’s look at these a little.

An Underdog Sports Drama 

Dangal does dramatically show an underdog from a modest background overcoming all obstacles and winning a championship.  However, the drama of wrestling matches is difficult to show visually, because much of the narrative ebb-and-flow takes place in the minds of the competitors, in connection with what moves to attempt at a given moment.  Dangal makes a good attempt here, but the narrative possibilities are limited.

Nationalistic Pride
Indians understandably take pride in depictions showing their own people winning championships at the international level.  But I didn’t get the feeling that any of the participants in the film were motivated by patriotic fervour.  Mahavir and Kadam seemed driven by selfish pride and their own egotistical obsessions with self-esteem.  And Geeta, the most selfless person in the story, seemed more to be trying to live up to her father’s faith in her.

In fact in these kinds of one-man competitions like wrestling, it is difficult to evoke a notion supporting national community.  A better presentation that probably did evoke communal pride was the film Lagaan (2001), where teamwork incorporating contributors from a spectrum of social sectors was a factor.  Indeed it is good to remember that India has made profound contributions to the world, not the least of which has been the sustained demonstration of a society comprising many different religions and social practises managing to live together in social harmony.  But that notion of “we are all one people” is under threat in India these days [7], and we need more artistic presentations that evoke our communal compassion and remind us of what we share, rather those that just evoke individual pride.

A Feminist Perspective

Of course a drama about young girls winning wrestling competitions is naturally going to have a feminist perspective, and many people have praised the film for this.  But I am not alone in feeling that the feminist sympathies are limited here [8,9].  It is true that, as one friend of Geeta’s and Babita’s tells them at one point in the film, many young girls in India are only seen as burdens to their families and are married off to someone they don’t know as soon as they reach the age of 14.  So, the friend tells them, they should be happy that their father takes such an interest in them. 

But Mahavir’s interest in his two daughters seems just to be in support of his own sexist prejudices.  He wants to forcibly convert his two elder daughters into boys so that they can serve as tools for his own purposes.  He even wants to make them look like boys by cutting their hair short and making them wear boys pants.  Then when they look at themselves in the mirror, they will see boys, not girls.  I don’t think he appreciates the unmatchable contributions that girls and women can make in so many endeavours through their own feminine attributes .

So Dangal has its charm, but it also has its limitations, too.
★★★

Notes:

1. Murtaza Ali Khan, “Dangal Review: A powerhouse of a film about gender equality, love, sacrifice, and patriotism”, A Potpourri of Vestiges, (23 December 2016).   
2. Mike McCahill, “Dangal review – crowdpleasing wrestling drama keeps its eye on the big picture”, The Guardian, (23 December 2016).   
3. “List of highest-grossing Indian films”, Wikipedia, (3 January 2020).   
4. “Aamir Khan”, Wikipedia, (1 November 2019).   
5. The Film Sufi, “‘Taare Zameen Par’ - by Aamir Khan (2007)”, The Film Sufi, (19 November 2019).   
6. Geeta Phogat won India's first gold medal in women's wrestling in the 55 kg freestyle category at the 2010 Commonwealth Games.  And Babita Kumari Phogat won a bronze medal at the 2012 World Wrestling Championships and won the gold medal in 2014 Commonwealth Games.
7. Kapil Komireddi, “Is India still a democracy?”, New Statesman, (6 January 2020).   
8. Namrata Joshi, “Dangal: nationalism over feminism”, The Hindu, (22 December 2016),      
9. Vartika Pande, “A Feminist Reading Of Dangal”, Feminism in India, (26 December 2016).   

“Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India” - Ashutosh Gowariker (2001)

Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (2001) was a big hit both inside India and internationally.  Released in India under the title Lagaan (meaning “Taxation”), the film was written and directed by Ashutosh Gowariker and starred and was produced by Aamir Khan (this was the inaugural offering of Khan’s new production company, Aamir Khan Productions).  The film took eight Indian National Film Awards and was nominated for a U. S. Academy Awards Oscar as Best Foreign Film [1].

Actually, Lagaan’s overseas success was somewhat unusual for a Bollywood movie, because such works are often criticized by foreign viewers for being long, melodramatic, and formulaic.  So was this film different in these respects?  Not really. Lagaan is also long (more than 3½ hours), melodramatic, and formulaic, too, but the film is so well crafted that it still offers everyone an outstanding viewing experience [2,3,4,5].

Note that a further aspect of Lagaan that one might imagine could limit the breadth of its popularity concerns a key element of its plot – a cricket match.  In fact the last 80 minutes of the film are devoted to covering a dramatic cricket match, the outcome of which will determine the fates of the principal characters. Most Americans, and probably most citizens of countries that were not once part of the British Empire, have only barely heard of the sport of cricket, but they have never seen it played, and they are unfamiliar with its arcane rules.  And even non-Indians somewhat familiar with cricket might assume that in most parts of the world the intricate game would only be popular among elites.  But cricket is actually very popular across all social strata in India, and I have a number of times seen young boys in Indian working-class neighbourhoods playing pickup cricket on the streets [6].
   

Lagaan is set in a small town, Champaner, in 1893 during the British Raj.  The way the British overseers operated in those days was that they maintained many local cantonments that tolerated the continued rule of local upper-class rajahs as long as these rulers paid high taxes to their British overlords for “maintaining the peace” in their regions.  But in this film we learn that there have been extensive droughts in Champaner over the last two years, and the impoverished farmers were unable to pay their taxes to the local rajah last year.  This year the drought conditions are the same, but the intolerant commanding officer of the local cantonment, Captain Andrew Russell (played by Paul Blackthorne), is now demanding a doubled tax – last year’s unpaid taxes and this year’s too.

We early on get a glimpse of the differences in humanity of a couple of the key players in this story when we see Russell out hunting deer for sport.  While Russell is cruelly trying to gun down with his rifle some deer that he finds in the forest, a local peasant hiding in the bush, Bhuvan (Aamir Khan), repeatedly warns the targeted deer to bolt by secretly throwing a stone at them just before Russell pulls the trigger.  The deer suddenly move, and Russell misses his target.  We see that Russell is trying to exploit living things, and Bhuvan is trying to save them.

Later we see Bhuvan leading a group of villagers to visit local Raja Puran Singh (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) to beseech him for tax relief.  When they approach the rajah’s palace, they see British officers, including Russell, playing cricket on the palace grounds.  Bhuvan happens to make a casual, derogatory remark about the frivolity of the game, and Russell takes immediate offence.  The British captain challenges the villagers to a high-stakes three-day cricket match.   If the villagers lose, they will have to pay triple the usual tax; but if they win, they will be exempt from paying any taxes for three years.  They will have three months to prepare for the match.

Of course, the chances of the villagers winning such a match are essentially zero, because none of them have ever played cricket before, while the British are experienced players of the game.  But the headstrong Bhuvan, recognizing that the villagers’ situation is hopeless anyway if something isn’t done, feels they have nothing to lose.  So against the wishes of his village comrades, he accepts the wager on behalf of the whole village.

The next section of the film concerns Bhuvan’s efforts to recruit villagers for their cricket team.  He reminds them that cricket has some similarities with their traditional game of gilli-danda.  But for the most part, they’re going to have to learn the game of cricket from scratch.  One of the basic things they have to learn is simply how to catch a ball.

Along the way here, there are occasions for promoting some of the positive themes of the film.  One of these concerns the implicit benefits of engaging in a competitive activity that is played by the rules.  You have to learn the rules and agree to play fair.  This serves as a reminder that the idea of (or at least the emphasis of) fair-play and sportsmanship is one of the great contributions that the British have made to world culture.

Another positive theme of the film, and one that is very important for modern India, is the promotion of the idea that Indians, despite their various cultural disparities, are one people.  This was the idea promoted by Gandhi and Nehru, and it is reflected in this film by Bhuvan’s ecumenical efforts to recruit members for the cricket team.  He convinces his colleagues to set aside their various prejudices concerning caste, class, and religion and to remember that everyone is just a person entitled to the same rights and degrees of respect.  When you are recruiting teammates, the main criteria are skills and capabilities, not caste.  So eventually Bhuvan recruits a team consisting of Hindus, Sikhs, Moslems, and an Untouchables (Dalit).  He even recruits one player (Kachra, the Dalit), whose semi-crippled arm makes him naturally suited for cricket spin-bowling.  Once the team is assembled, it is time for them to engage in earnest practice.

Naturally, there has to be some romantic element in such a movie, and Lagaan is no exception.  Gauri (Gracy Singh) is a beautiful village girl who has her heart set on Bhuvan, and there are many scenes in the film showing their tentatively tender interactions.  Gracy Singh, who plays Gauri, is an excellent dancer, by the way, and her captivating dancing is an artistic highlight of  many of the musical numbers in the movie. 

Of course, we expect some romantic complications, too, and those come from Andrew Russell’s beautiful younger sister, Elizabeth (Rachel Shelley), who also falls in love with Bhuvan (again an instance of dismissing cultural, national, and class boundaries).  Unlike her arrogant and self-serving brother, Elizabeth is naturally warm-hearted, and she feels her brother’s treatment of the villagers is unfair.  So she secretly sneaks out to the village and teaches the nascent cricket players some basic aspects of the game.  And on one occasion she even manages to come over and give them a real, authentic cricket ball, replacing the makeshift one they had been using.

Finally we get to the three-day cricket match, with each team having one innings (one turn at bat), and that’s what occupies the last 80 minutes of the film.  Andrew Russell wins the coin toss and elects for his team to bat first.  And as you might expect, there are many melodramatic turns to this match. 

One serious problem that comes up for the village squad is when one of their players, Lakha (Yashpal Sharma), betrays his team and begins secretly helping the British team.  Lakha, we learn, has a crush on Gauri and is jealous of her preference for Bhuvan.  Lakha hopes that a village-team defeat will disgrace Bhuvan and thereby enhance his chances for Gauri.  So on the first day of the match, Lakha intentionally drops several catchable balls in the field that could have resulted in outs for the British team.  When Lakha’s perfidy is finally exposed, his teammates want to smash him, but the relentlessly humanistic Bhuvan convinces them to accept Lakha’s repentance and allow him the chance to redeem himself.  And on the second day of the match, Lakha does make some outstanding plays in the field.

The dramatic three-day match eventually winds to a close, and despite the presumed vast superiority of the British team, the outcome comes down to the last ball.  I’ll let you watch the film to see for yourself what happens.


As I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, what makes Lagaan a fine film is the high quality of the production values throughout.  The acting is emphatic and melodramatic, but it suits a narrative like this.  In particular, the persistent frown, presumably connoting concentration, on the part of Aamir Khan works very well here, and this is one of the best performances of that popular actor.    

I also liked the half dozen musical pieces, many of them featuring outstanding solo and ensemble dancing, (my favourite ones were the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th pieces) scattered through the first two-thirds of the film.  I have already referred to Gracy Singh’s superb dancing, but mention should also be made of Aamir Khan’s excellent dancing, too.  And overall, the film music by A. R. Rahman is a fine contribution.

In addition, the cinematography of Anil Mehta and the film editing of Ballu Saluja is very professional.   Those, combined with Ashutosh Gowariker’s script, enable the filmmakers to portray a cricket match and make it clear even for the uninitiated.  My only complaint, and it’s a minor one, would be that there was a little too much screen-time devoted to villagers ecstatically celebrating good plays that were made by their team in the field. 

And at the very end of the film when the match is completed, rain clouds form and rain begins to fall, thankfully signalling the end of the long drought.  So viewers can be assured at the close that good times are ahead.
★★★½

Notes:

1. “List of accolades received by Lagaan”, Wikipedia, (23 December 2019).    
2. Dave Kehr, “FILM REVIEW; The Cricketing of an Indian Village”, The New York Times, (8 May 2002).   
3. Marjorie Baumgarten, “Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India”, Austin Chronicle, (24 May 2002).   
4. Roger Ebert, “LAGAAN: ONCE UPON A TIME IN INDIA”, RogerEbert.com, (7 June 2002).   
5. Jeffrey M. Anderson, “Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (2001)”, Combustible Celluloid, (2002).   
6. “Cricket in India”, Wikipedia, (6 December 2019).   

“Rang De Basanti” - Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra (2006)

Rang De Basanti (literally “Color it Spring”, i.e color it with the hues of spring (saffron) – 2006) is an Indian comedy/drama that has achieved great popularity, due in part to its invocation of Indian patriotism via mainstream Bollywood cinematics [1].  Based on a story by Kamlesh Pandey, the film was directed by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra and co-scripted by Mehra, Pandey, and Rensil D'Silva.  It featured a top cast of performers, headed by popular actor Aamir Khan.  Indeed there are some interesting features of this film that contribute to its popularity; but there are also some problematic issues, which I will discuss below. 

The story of the film is about a young English woman’s (Sue McKinley’s) efforts to shoot her own historical docudrama about heroic acts of patriotism on the part of some young Indian activists seeking Indian independence from Britain in the 1920s.  The woman was inspired to make this film after reading the diary of her grandfather, who was a British prison official in India and oversaw the executions of some of these freedom fighters.  However, since the woman is unable to secure commercial funding for her filmmaking efforts, she goes to India on her own to see if she can recruit some nonprofessional actors to act in her movie.  Ultimately she hires a ragtag collection of wiseacre college students to play in her film, and this is where the comedy elements enter into the picture.  But after awhile, an event takes place that causes these cynical goofballs to reassess their own responsibilities towards the furtherance of social justice.

With respect to this narrative, there are two interesting elements that stand out.  One is thematic and concerns the question of what issues may be worth dying for.  In particular, are there social issues in this regard that go beyond the immediate concerns of self-preservation and self-gratification (including just the concerns for family and close associates) and that encompass a much wider social scope?  And in this respect, how far should one go?  These are the kinds of questions that young college graduates might ask themselves in connection with what, if anything, they should dedicate the rests of their lives to.

The second narrative element of interest concerns the multilayered structure of narrative reality that exists in this film for the viewer.  (I have earlier discussed such multilayers of narrative structure in connection with my review of Wim Wenders’s The Salt of the Earth [2]).  Here in this film there are four levels of reality that the viewer may be semiconscious of:

1. The external, “real world” of the viewer.  At this level, the viewer is aware that he or she is watching a film directed by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra.  The viewer, of course, may construct his or her own fabula as to how this film was made.   
    
2. The “reality” of Sue McKinley’s filmmaking activities.  This is the immediate narrative level of the film.
    
3. The world depicted in Sue McKinley’s docudrama.  This is the syuzhet of Sue McKinley’s story, which is always presented in sepia-toned images in this film. 
    
4. The “objective” reality of what actually happened back in 1921-31 in India in connection with those doomed, heroic freedom fighters.  This is sometimes supported by old newsreel footage and photos.

Mehra sometimes blurs the boundaries of these levels by intermixing images from them, and this calls the viewer’s attention to these various narrative levels and makes for interesting viewing.  For example in the first scenes presumably showing what actually happened back in 1931  (narrative level 4), we are presented with shots that we will later infer are apparently drawn from Sue McKinley’s later-to-be-made docudrama (narrative level 3).

The story of Rang De Basanti (narrative level 3) plays out over approximately five segments. 
  

1.  Starting a Film Project
The movie opens with sepia-toned images in 1931 in British India, showing prison official James McKinley (played by Steven Mackintosh), describing his supervision of the executions of Indian activist Bhagat Singh and a couple of Singh’s revolutionary partners.  McKinley remarks, and records in his diary, that he had always thought there were just two kinds of people in the world – those who faced their own deaths silently and those who faced death with a scream.  But now with Singh he had encountered a rare third type – someone who joyfully embraced death with a smile.  This he found extraordinary.

Then the scene shifts to the present, with McKinley’s young granddaughter, filmmaker Sue McKinley (Alice Patten, who, as you might expect, is a blonde), reading from her grandfather’s diary and drawing inspiration from Singh’s evident steadfast adherence to his revolutionary principles.  She resolves to make a docudrama about these historic activities, but she is unable to persuade her TV studio superiors to fund her project.  So she travels to India on her own in the hopes of making a low-budget film on the subject.

On arrival, Sue is met by her friend Sonia (Soha Ali Khan), who is studying at university, and together they try to recruit amateur actors for the film project.  The young buffoons who tryout for her film are shown to be hopelessly inadequate, though, and this is where comedic elements first appear in the story.

2.  Recruiting Sonia’s Friends
Later Sue meets and socializes with Sonia’s university friends.  Although these boys are all cynical, self-indulgent pleasure-seekers, Sue feels they have “character” and decides to hire them to play in her film.  They are 

• Karan Singhania (Siddharth Narayan) to play the role of Bhagat Singh
• Daljit 'DJ' Singh (Aamir Khan) to play Chandrashekhar Azad
• Atul Kulkarni (Laxman Pandey) to play Ramprasad Bismil
• Aslam Khan (Kunal Kapoor) to play Ashfaqullah Khan
• Sukhi Ram (Sharman Joshi) to play Shivaram Rajguru
• and also Sonia will play Durgawati Devi

They are an eclectic lot.  Karan is the son of a high government official.  Aslam comes from a poor Muslim family.  And Atul is an active and fanatical member of a violently far-right Hindu nationalist party (incidentally, Atul’s political leader and boss reminds me of somebody).

This part of the film, which is also bent on being heavily jocular, is spent dwelling on these friends and is apparently intended to signify Mehra’s conception of carefree joy.  But it mostly just shows these people incessantly goofing off, exchanging high-fives, and engaging in narcissistic jigs of self-celebration.  Some viewers have apparently been charmed by these antics, but I found this over-the-top, nonstop ceremonial admiration of self (mostly on the part of Aamir Khan) to be tiresome and overwrought.

3.  Rehearsals 
Although the boys are all cynical, their self-absorption makes them each want to amount to something, and they begin taking their acting assignments seriously.  This section of the film shows some of the sepia-toned sequences that are produced, including a scene covering the famous Kakori train robbery undertaken by the revolutionary activists in 1925.  Reference is also made to the notorious Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919, which made Bhagat Singh commit himself to revolution.

4.  Ajay Rathod  
Now more attention is paid to Sonia’s boyfriend, Ajay Rathod (R. Madhavan), who is a MIG-21 pilot for the Indian air force.  He proposes marriage to Sonia, and all the friends celebrate.  Also, Sue and DJ seem to be falling in love.

We are also shown further sepia-toned images of Sue’s docudrama production, including one sequence showing James McKinley’s supervising torture of his captured activists, all of whom fail to crack and give away their fellow conspirators.  Another sepia sequence shows the Indian activists planning and then carrying through with an assassination of British police officer J. P. Saunders.  Gradually, our carefree college boys are being asked to portray more and more desperate acts of revolution.

In the midst of all this production, they get the heartbreaking news that Ajay’s plane crashed and that Ajay had heroically refused to bail out when his plane was malfunctioning.  Instead, he had sacrificed his life in order to steer the falling plane to a safe location where there would be no civilian casualties.  Although we soon learn that the plane crash was actually due to faulty plane parts purchased by corrupt government officials, the Indian defence minister goes on TV and wrongfully blames the crash on what he claims was Ajay’s recklessness.

Later the people hold a peaceful candlelit march in honour of Ajay, which is brutally broken up by baton-wielding police.  In the course of their mayhem, the police beating puts Ajay’s mother in a coma.

5.  The Boys Are Angry 
So now the boys, who in their film work have been portraying dedicated activists fighting social injustice, are facing injustice in their own lives.  They are all fired up. 

Supposedly emulating the historical figures they have just been role-playing in their film work, the boys quickly decide to assassinate the Indian defence minister to avenge Ajay Rathod’s death.  This they carry out in a brutal shooting.  Then Karan, having learned of his father’s involvement in the corrupt purchase of faulty MIG-21 airplane parts, goes home and murders his dad. 

However, the media depict the defence minister as a heroic victim of terrorists, and the injustice he has committed is not publicly recognized.  So the frustrated boys go and violently takeover an All India Radio talk show so that they can report over the air the “truth” concerning the wrongs they have supposedly righted.  When they do so, Karan also confesses also that he has just killed his father.  But time is short; the police quickly storm the radio station building and kill all of our actor-boys.  Nevertheless, the boys did get their message out, and the final shots show people expressing their anger about the social injustice that the boys had complained about.


Rang De Basanti has achieved considerable popularity with the public, but from my perspective there are a number of problems with this film.  And these problems span several dimensions of the film’s storytelling.  Considering five of these issues, in order of increasing importance, we can start with some technical elements.

First, we might mention Binod Pradhan’s flashy cinematography, which I found to be mildly disturbing.   The film is littered throughout with swish-pans and rapid-fire montages that only distract the viewer.  These visual pyrotechnics lack motivation and just interfere with what is going on.

A second issue of concern is the already-mentioned overacting on the parts of the recruited college boys.  I accept that Bollywood movies can often feature strenuous histrionics, but here the exaggerated swaggering of these incessantly high-fiving, self-admiring clowns is just too much and counterproductive.  It reduces the viewer’s likelihood of empathising with these key characters.

Moving up to the narrative level, there are two further problems.  One concerns the disconnect between what appears to be Sue McKinley’s simplistic filmmaking means and the presumably sophisticated film production support that she would have needed to make her docudrama scenes that we see in sepia tone.  For example, what other people and equipment were available to help her shoot that complicated Kakori train-robbery sequence?

And another problem is associated with the all-too-sudden characterological shift on the part of the recruited college boys from good-for-nothing wiseguys to dedicated, selfless patriots.  The film needs to spend more time motivating this shift and showing how the boys were psychologically transformed.  As it is, it’s all just too quick.

But the biggest problem with the film, and the one that ultimately condemns it, is the film’s identification of justice with revenge.  I have commented earlier in connection with my review of Tangsir (1974) [3] on the wrongfulness of celebrating the visceral feelings of vengeance and advocating vengeance as a means to achieving social justice.  In fact, all that revenge does is answer one wrongful deed with another and thereby accentuate feelings of resentment.  When we see grave injustice being perpetrated around the world [4,5], the way to respond is not to go to war and somehow punish the evil-doers.  This will only perpetuate the continuation of injustice.  The best path to follow is to make a concerted effort to achieve harmony by following an altruistic path.  As Matthieu Ricard has observed [6]:

“If a patient suffering from mental disturbances strikes the doctor examining him, the latter won’t hit back but, on the contrary, seek the best ways to cure him from his madness.”
. . .
“True altruism consists of wishing that the harm-doer become aware of his deviance and thus stop harming his fellow beings.  This reaction, which is the opposite of the wish to avenge and punish by inflicting more suffering, is not a sign of weakness, but of wisdom.”

India ultimately achieved its freedom from Great Britain and its remarkable social harmony, not by means of terrorist acts of revenge, but by following the path of Mahatma Gandhi.

So despite Rang De Basanti’s other virtues, including its sometimes interesting mingling of multiple narrative levels, I cannot endorse this film.

★★

Notes:

1. G. Allen Johnson, 'Rang De Basanti', SFGATE, (5 May 2006).  
2. The Film Sufi, “‘The Salt of the Earth’ - Wim Wenders and Juliano Salgado (2014)”,  The Film Sufi, (12 October 2015).   
3. The Film Sufi, “‘Tangsir’ - Amir Naderi (1974)”, The Film Sufi, (1 April 2016).   
4. Arundhati Roy, “India: Intimations of an Ending”, The Nation, (22 November 2019).
5. Adrian Zenz and Bernhard Zand, “China's Oppression of the Uighurs: ‘The Equivalent of Cultural Genocide’”, Der Spiegel, (28 November 2019).   
6. Matthieu Ricard, Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World, Little, Brown and Company, (2013; English translation by Charlotte and Sam Gordon, 2015), pp. 34-35.