Chalte Chalte was a hit. Baghban was a hit. Kal Ho Naa Ho is a hit. What is their secret formula?
Mediocre stories, hackneyed emotions and dollops of self-pity. This is what three different filmmakers have somehow managed to pack in their films. The bad news is, we love it.
Not surprisingly, the spoonfeeding continues, and the process is all too familiar. They will make you feel good all the way until it is time to make you cry. The educated truck driver (talk about contrived characters) of Chalte Chalte prances all the way to Greece in the first half of the film. And then, he will reveal all his complexities and ruin your mood until it is time to pick you up from the floor and send you home with a smile.
The doting father of Baghban epitomises parental pride and affection in the beginning, only to go bankrupt and become a puppet in his children's hands. Then he will write a book, make a long speech and instil guilt even among the most dutiful.
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A happy-go-very-unlucky man who possibly smiles even when constipated breathes life into a girl's world and just when you lower your guard, he is shaking hands with Yamraj himself. Kleenex, anyone?
A wafer-thin marriage-based plot, ungrateful children and a don't-worry-about-me-I-am-only-dying matchmaker -- these are the plots of three most successful films in recent times. Probably the only thing worse than this pathetic trend is the fact that each of these has been seen many times before.
No matter what their makers say, Baghban is Avtaar (Rajesh Khanna, Shabana Azmi), Kal Ho Naa Ho is Anand (Rajesh Khanna, Amitabh Bachchan). And I don't even want to find out how many similar films have been made before Chalte Chalte.
While our own earlier films showed restraint in tackling these subjects and aimed to make you think, the new breed is expert at creating scenes that can make you howl. In a cruel display of newly learnt craft, they successfully drag the audience along through mush, melodrama, grief and emotional waste.
The question is, the films are working, so what am I on about?
We are not growing. A well made Dil Chahta Hai wins little more than appreciation. A sensitive Mr & Mrs Iyer wins little more than awards. A touchingly bold Astitva disappeared overnight. A delightfully contemporary Jhankaar Beats does better, but probably made less money overall than Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham did in two days.
Deprived of quality and starved of education, we repeatedly fall for what we have been brought up on -- family drama in which making moral judgement is easy; people are bad until they become good; and parents are never wrong.
Is it the comfort zone that the audience demands? Or the safety zone that most filmmakers do not dare step out of?
So, Farhan Akhtar, Mahesh Manjrekar, Sujoy Ghosh, Shaad Ali, Ken Ghosh, Chandan Arora, Robby Grewal and Parvati Balagopalan -- we are counting on you. None of you is a great filmmaker yet, but you have given us hope. Stay away from formulae and let each film be a new statement of your creativity and understanding of human behaviour. Let your education and intelligence shine through your films. And may you dare to go where few of today's Hindi filmmakers have gone before.
