Introduction:This is a happy blog. You might find it funny or terribly insightful. The degree of insightfulness depends on how long you’ve been watching live news on TV.
Nearly quarter of a century ago, in the year 1986, Kamalhasan produced and starred in a film named ‘Vikram’.
Happened to watch the film a few weeks ago, thanks to my friendly neighbourhood DVD seller.
The story goes something like this: Indian scientists make a missile, the villains steal it, take it away to a desert kingdom and the hero goes in search of it and deactivates it just in time to prevent global annihilation. A pretty ‘James Bond’-esque film with the mandatory three heroines- the ugliest horny one dies, the reasonably good-looking horny ones chase him…
The late ‘Sujatha’ Rangarajan had written the film’s script along with Kamalhasan.
Let’s leave things like graphics and SFX alone (even now, Tamil film industry still hasn’t figured out how to make SFX undetectable).
The brilliance of this film lies in its almost Nostradamus-like vision of the future. You have the main characters talking about things like ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles) and a missile with an embedded computer chip that is programmed for self-destruction.
There’s a scene in which Kamalhasan asks, “Why don’t you bring out an adin the paper to find the missile?” and Charuhasan’s character replies, “It would damage our reputation as peace-loving nation if we now announce that we have a WMD (weapon of mass destruction, not quite the phrase that he uses) and lost it.”
Sathyaraj is the main villain. All his henchmen had guns.
The film was released a few years before IT revolution started in India and people like ‘Sujatha’ talked (through the onscreen characters, of course) about things like embedded computer chips in a simplified way that everybody understood.
Let’s fast forward nearly 25 years to 2010.
India is now one of the greatest forces to reckon with as far as technology, IT and military power is concerned. The richest and most eco-friendly Venture Capital funder in the world is a former Indian. Almost all the software that the entire world uses has at least one Indian in the development team.
So, what kind of films do we make now in Tamil?
‘Avatar? ‘Hurt Locker?’ Nah!
Forget the hero’s characterization in our recent “popular films”. It’s abig ha-ha-ha and fortunately, it is out of context in this entry. We’remore interested in his arms and ammunitions. His “Weapon of Mass Destruction” is/are knife/sickle/aruvaals/casuarinas sticks/all of the above. Explains deforestation!
While the rest of the world goes planet hunting, we go back in time to unheard-of-paalayams.
The directors of such films claim that they are trying to capture the “innocence” of remote villages “untainted” by “modern life”. How innocent these “remote villagers” are, is a completely different and hilarious story (aren’t they the ones with computers that are most infected with porn site viruses?)
Just curious, but what kind of films would we be making in Tamil 25 years from now? Stories of islands and tribes “untouched by modern life”, so untouched that they would still be rubbing stones to start fire?
So, now, a very unrelated POINT TO PONDER: Why do most anchorpersons on those annoying Indian-English news channels talk as if their colleagues had left something very sharp (pointing skyward) on their seats and theydidn’t watch where they were sitting before the camera started to roll?
Next post: What do Anil Ambani and I have in common? A brother wecan’t stand…