Rang de basanti - My Review
My Review of Rang de Basanti…
I watched this movie after a while after listening to comments from my friends. Most of them liked it because it revolved around a college life, but my perspective of the movie was different. Some might share the same perspective.
My perspective is divided into two things:
MIG crashes, It is a serious issue.
When it comes to wars, India has always adopted no first attack strategy. Ours is a peaceful nation and that makes me proud about it! However it would be any nation’s pride to have ultra sophisticated, automated and powerful military and warfare system. Although India is known to have not spent too much on Military systems since last many years and to its substantiation, it’s well known that India’s per capita expenditure on military is way lower than that of many other nations, but that does not make it weak from any view point. However, the system failure is not only an engineering fault but a managerial fault.
This reminds me of my days in Dr Reddy’s when my ultimate boss used to say “behind all the big firms, there are some people! And people make mistakes. So firms make mistakes. Later on, all these mistakes result in accidents.
Coming to the story, a British girl Sue finds a diary of her grand father who lived in India during 1900s when India was under British Rule. She finds that legend has it that great heroes have lived in India who could die not with tears, not with sorrow, but with cheerfulness and satisfaction of achieving something. She gets an idea of coming to India and make a documentary with some Indian people on these India Heroes. On coming to India, she meets her Indian friend who helps her find some people who could act and look common but after a discouragement, she could find these chaps- Aamir khan and the gang who were really jocks in their style.
The problem is they can’t identify with their characters; they don’t believe in the freedom fighters they’re trying to portray, or their ideologies. This is generation next, and consumerism and hedonism rule, patriotism doesn’t even get a look in. Why would someone give up their life for their country? Especially one so corrupt, disparate, and polluted in its current state... As the students re-acquaint themselves with Indian history, we slowly witness the gradual transition from free-spirited youths without cause to something quite unexpected.
They don’t take the idea sincerely and are not serious at all about all this. However on convincing they get ready and its then that they also realize that patriotism is intoxicating. One fine day all of them get news that their friend (Madhavan) loses his life in an MIG crash. They become really impatient and gather a rally to protest against the government for bad engineering and faulty parts of the MIG. Their rally is badly destroyed by the authorities and they get injuries and Madhavan’s mother is also badly injured.
Because of all this, these guys decide to assassinate the defense minister of the Country. They successfully carry out this task and go to the All India radio station to announce publicly about all this. They answer various questions which people ask them on why they did and whats wrong and whats right! (Looked a bit dramatic to me though)
The film doesn’t preach, it’s not jingoistic or whiney, it just makes you reflect, want to talk, and possibly even act... It shows the difference between past year’s freedom fighters, and the ways in which people can make an active difference today - we may have the solutions to problems, but before acting upon them first we have to acknowledge that we are part of it. Our lackadaisical attitude about most things means we’re always the first to criticize, yet always the last in stepping forward to improve the situation.
A film within a film, a social and political parable, a snapshot of the youth of today; their simmering discontent slowly turning to indifference, and the prevailing moral degeneration of the nation. It’s bold, ambitious, subtle yet downright fervent as the protagonists hurtle towards their final act, with the same infectious passion and laughter we have become accustomed to. As serious as it all sounds, this is one of the most entertaining and fun movies to come out of India in recent years.
The performances are fantastic, and as an ensemble they compliment each other beautifully. Khan continues his march for path-breaking movies and quality cinema, whilst debutante Patten (daughter of Chris..) is aptly contemplative and excited as Sue. It’d be easy to mistake this for a patriotic movie, it’s not. More a tale of humanity, morality, and taking a stand rather than being part of the silent majority. Its audacious spirit becomes its beauty. “A Generation Awakens” - It surely does.
Coming to India 2020:
If the generation awakens, Kalam’s dream of India as a developed nation is not far away.
People of our nation know what they are doing, what is good and what is bad for them. They are educated and sophisticated enough that they can drive the world !
May India succeed in its 2020 mission.
Lets all contribute our bit to this mission
I watched this movie after a while after listening to comments from my friends. Most of them liked it because it revolved around a college life, but my perspective of the movie was different. Some might share the same perspective.
My perspective is divided into two things:
MIG crashes, It is a serious issue.
When it comes to wars, India has always adopted no first attack strategy. Ours is a peaceful nation and that makes me proud about it! However it would be any nation’s pride to have ultra sophisticated, automated and powerful military and warfare system. Although India is known to have not spent too much on Military systems since last many years and to its substantiation, it’s well known that India’s per capita expenditure on military is way lower than that of many other nations, but that does not make it weak from any view point. However, the system failure is not only an engineering fault but a managerial fault.
This reminds me of my days in Dr Reddy’s when my ultimate boss used to say “behind all the big firms, there are some people! And people make mistakes. So firms make mistakes. Later on, all these mistakes result in accidents.
Coming to the story, a British girl Sue finds a diary of her grand father who lived in India during 1900s when India was under British Rule. She finds that legend has it that great heroes have lived in India who could die not with tears, not with sorrow, but with cheerfulness and satisfaction of achieving something. She gets an idea of coming to India and make a documentary with some Indian people on these India Heroes. On coming to India, she meets her Indian friend who helps her find some people who could act and look common but after a discouragement, she could find these chaps- Aamir khan and the gang who were really jocks in their style.
The problem is they can’t identify with their characters; they don’t believe in the freedom fighters they’re trying to portray, or their ideologies. This is generation next, and consumerism and hedonism rule, patriotism doesn’t even get a look in. Why would someone give up their life for their country? Especially one so corrupt, disparate, and polluted in its current state... As the students re-acquaint themselves with Indian history, we slowly witness the gradual transition from free-spirited youths without cause to something quite unexpected.
They don’t take the idea sincerely and are not serious at all about all this. However on convincing they get ready and its then that they also realize that patriotism is intoxicating. One fine day all of them get news that their friend (Madhavan) loses his life in an MIG crash. They become really impatient and gather a rally to protest against the government for bad engineering and faulty parts of the MIG. Their rally is badly destroyed by the authorities and they get injuries and Madhavan’s mother is also badly injured.
Because of all this, these guys decide to assassinate the defense minister of the Country. They successfully carry out this task and go to the All India radio station to announce publicly about all this. They answer various questions which people ask them on why they did and whats wrong and whats right! (Looked a bit dramatic to me though)
The film doesn’t preach, it’s not jingoistic or whiney, it just makes you reflect, want to talk, and possibly even act... It shows the difference between past year’s freedom fighters, and the ways in which people can make an active difference today - we may have the solutions to problems, but before acting upon them first we have to acknowledge that we are part of it. Our lackadaisical attitude about most things means we’re always the first to criticize, yet always the last in stepping forward to improve the situation.
A film within a film, a social and political parable, a snapshot of the youth of today; their simmering discontent slowly turning to indifference, and the prevailing moral degeneration of the nation. It’s bold, ambitious, subtle yet downright fervent as the protagonists hurtle towards their final act, with the same infectious passion and laughter we have become accustomed to. As serious as it all sounds, this is one of the most entertaining and fun movies to come out of India in recent years.
The performances are fantastic, and as an ensemble they compliment each other beautifully. Khan continues his march for path-breaking movies and quality cinema, whilst debutante Patten (daughter of Chris..) is aptly contemplative and excited as Sue. It’d be easy to mistake this for a patriotic movie, it’s not. More a tale of humanity, morality, and taking a stand rather than being part of the silent majority. Its audacious spirit becomes its beauty. “A Generation Awakens” - It surely does.
Coming to India 2020:
If the generation awakens, Kalam’s dream of India as a developed nation is not far away.
People of our nation know what they are doing, what is good and what is bad for them. They are educated and sophisticated enough that they can drive the world !
May India succeed in its 2020 mission.
Lets all contribute our bit to this mission
posted by Rohit Malshe at 6:55 PM
12 Comments:
Bhai , in a review dont reveal the whole story ! Agar maine dekha na ho to ?? waise .. reviews should be like statistics, they should reveal a lot but show little.
whrz ur second perspective??
Kasa re tu?
Saglyaana picture baghun enjoy karunde na... Story ka sangtoys?
Well written... well thought of...
Hi,
Well expressed..
Hey!! your writing style has improved a lot.
Hey people ! Thanks for your comments.
Sowmya - I dont want to share my second perspective which always finds technical mistakes in the movies. Thats bad actually but its like that only.
Dear Anonymous- Please reveal identity. Its difficult to guess who has written.
Veenu- before you come to this comment book and scrap, I would say thanks to you for your intellectual discussions about the movie.
Coming up next- Ye hai goonj dil se.
badhiya hai....:)
Great description of movie..! Nicely thought correlation with APJ Kalam's vision of India in 2020. Definitely the movie inspires our nation to wake up from it's prolonged dormancy.
Why Rang de Basanti is a scary movie
Priya posted this to me.
This is written by Sagarika Ghose
FIVE BADLY behaved but photogenic young louts and their hanger-on girl regularly gather at night at a geographical feature resembling the Grand Canyon. There they take deep slugs of beer. Next they speed through rural Punjab on motorbikes and eat parathas with one of their mothers who tells them about Sikh folklore. One of them returns home, which is a pillared palace, where a nasty father sips whisky in the morning and clinches an evil weapons deal. The 'Muslim' member of the gang goes back to a very 'Muslim' home where a lungi-clad dad is waiting to deliver a short seminar paper on Partition, vote-bank politics and other 'Muslim' issues.
A pretty (but cerebral) cultural tourist from Britain arrives. She reminds the foul-mouthed brats about their history. She wants to (and does) make a documentary on Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad in which the five take the main roles. Each of the gang informs the British tourist about the hollowness of their lives by delivering caricature-speeches entitled 'Youth Alienation'. "I am young," they intone, "but without ideals. Am therefore cut off from my country. My country is bad.
The system sucks. Therefore I am an alienated youth." But as the documentary progresses and the British film-maker introduces them to Bhagat Singh and others, they realise how best they can conquer their boredom. By assassinating some important people, of course.
The five ghastly friends have a fighter pilot friend whom they don't seem to care about much. Or do they? We never know. In fact, this friendship with the fighter pilot is the most crucial relationship in the film but it doesn't get more than three seconds of time or script. On one single occasion the gang rides with the pilot to a ruined monument with MiGs flying overhead. Later, the fighter pilot friend is killed piloting a MiG, and the five decide that even though they've not spent much time with the fighter pilot, even though they don't really know him too well, they must immediately murder the defence minister.
So they do. They also kill the awful whisky-oriented dad who got rich from bringing in the MiGs in the first place. While they kill the neta and the dad, pictures of Bhagat Singh and Azad play in the background, forcing us to believe that criminal spoilt brats are actually freedom fighters.
The climax of Rang de Basanti is perhaps the most chilling, the most strange. It takes place in the glare of 24-hour television and radio. It is a technicolour death on TV. Young people from all across the land roar out their approval of the bloody-minded youths on TV. The action unfolds on TV and FM radio, as the fallen five wait to die in a denouement captured in second-to-second radio and television drama. A mammoth TV crowd bellows out its hatred of the politician. Another TV throng screams its loathing of The System. A jostling, demented, anarchic TV populace, like a purple-faced crowd in a Roman amphitheatre, yells for more blood to be spilled, both of villain and hero. All on 24hour-TV. Scary! Why is Rang de Basanti a scary film? Because it is a film that is unable to distinguish between media and reality. It is the ultimate made-in-media-India film.It is not rooted in any kind of reality, does not explore the position of the politician in our society, nor does it tell any kind of tale of heroism and ideals, nor does it bother to find real believable people in a real believable situation.
Sure Bollywood is all fantasy anyway, but the best fantasies are always those that are, as Javed Akhtar once said, like kites that are tied firmly to a stake in the earth, not simply kites in free fall. The transcendant brilliance of Sholay was not just its luminous script but its perfectly located reality: the fact that the story was real, the characters were believable. Veeru and Jai are far greater patriots than the neon-lit young people of Rang de Basanti gyrating to disco music one night and gunning down the defence minister the next.
Some blame the electronic media. That 24-hour news television is fostering a brute unthinking hatred of the politician and the 'The System'. Fostering hatred in full technicolour, where politicianabuse creates media stars on the one hand, and on the other creates a simple-minded society where the young must be either drunk or suicidal killers. But that's an unfair criticism. The media simply do their job and their job is to expose, to bombard and to deliver news. The media are undoubtedly a double-edged sword. It brings the politician up for public scrutiny in a sensational way. Yet the media are also a robust public service that democratises debate and brings lofty issues right down to the street or to the panchayat or to the college dorm. It would be unfair to accuse the media of encouraging young people to murder politicians.
A democratic citizenry must see the media as its ally in activism, not seek to gear its life to being on camera, as this film shows its heroes doing. A democratic citizenry must not become so enamoured, indeed so enslaved, by the media that it seeks to emulate in daily life. To become a dumb media animal with no sense of life or perspective outside radio or television, is to waltz closer to the abyss. An abyss of glittering bingo halls and bizarre 'locales' with no sense of how people actually live or speak, other than that captured by the camera. The media are a comrade in the fight, not a god that demands obedience.
Even youthful nationalism is not what Rang De Basanti makes it out to be. A group of idealistic young students from IIT have recently launched a 'political party'. Started in Jodhpur, it's called 'Paritrana' and its national president is a B.Tech in aerospace from IIT Bombay. Their aim is the "complete relief from distress" and they've been carrying out quiet unfussy door-to-door campaigns across Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.
In fact, many public-spirited young people are working at all kinds of initiatives across India and lots of dramatic films can be made on the many complex situations that are arising every day in their lives. Rang De Basanti does a terrible disservice to the nationalism of India's young people. It wilfully paints modern day patriots as unthinking antiestablishment killers. It foolishly creates a myth known as Gen Next which does nothing but drink and dance. And it promotes a leviathan media as the ultimate interpreter of India.
The fact that Rang de Basanti is a hit shows just how catastrophically distant we are getting from reality, where we're happy to live from media image to media image, from frame to frame, without realising the depth and profundity of 'ordinary' human dramas.
I agree with you Rohit...but Sagarika Ghosh got me all confused..i agree with her viewpoint too..maybe i'm too fickle minded to take a stand...but then i've always been inspired and impressed by movies only to forget them in hustle bustle of daily routine life the very next morning...RDB was too heavy for me...it made cry...made me sad..it was way too depressing for me...
anyways..ur review was very good..i liked ur "aisa kyon kar gaya koi.." too...ur talent is undoubtable..
whenever you say kudos for that poem you have to give equal credit to sowmya who wrote the first four lines.
I know tat RDB has a lot of flaws but i would prefer such a movie anyday over d other Bollywood movies...They are PATHETIC!!!! n no other word can describe them better...i dont know whr indian movie industry is heading but such movies once in a while which can make us think...discuss...argue...should be 'welcomed' i guess!
Thr r a lot of other movies which r really gud but fail to seek much attention just coz they dont have any 'BIG stars' in them...n d reason y RDB has struck d chord is coz it has d same 'fun-element' which DCH had...i dont know but i somehow felt so!
A few things are really absurd...i mean whn i heard d story(i heard it b4 i even saw d movie!) i thought...WAT? a frnd dies...n these ppl decide to kill a politician for tat?? i mean...wat d heck??! tatz way too unreal! but in d movie it didnt stand out so much...but d ending did! And i actually cried whn Aamir n Sidharth were going to die...{i know tatz Stupid! hee hee!}
okz...coming back to d topic...i myself feel tat d system in India is so pathetic...but it doesnt take long for d truth to sink...tat in a way i m also an integral part of it...so wat have i done to make it any better...n whn i saw d movie i really found some of my thoughts being reflected!
Watever it is...d movie is gud...but they could have done better... :)
PS: n thanx Rohit for mentioning my name jahan bhi us poem ka zikr hua...:D but d sad part...i havent found time to complete tat yet! :((
You may hate RDB, you may love RDB but theres no way you can ignore RDB...the best thing any movie can do is to leave its mark. So, does RDB leave a mark?? Absolutey, it motivates!!! You feel like doin something for India...you dont know exactly what; but something...and thats it!!!! RDB becomes successful.
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