E-Paper
B'wood 2004: War & peace
Indo-Pak friendship theme dominated Hindi film industry in 2004, writes Saibal Chatterjee.
Macho men in snazzy khaki, valiant soldiers engaged in fierce military combat and confused couples entrapped in a web of marital misadventures were the three sets of people that dominated mainstream Bollywood narratives in 2004. But what overshadowed everything else during the year was the Mumbai film industry's sudden obsession with Indo-Pak friendship.
The thawing of relations between the long feuding neighbours on the ground, helped no doubt by an enormously successful friendship tour of Pakistan by India's cricket team, gave Bollywood's usually jingoistic scriptwriters a reason to celebrate peace, if only for selfish, profit-oriented reasons.
Two of the biggest Bollywood hits of the year, Farah Khan's nostalgia-dripped mish-mash Main Hoon Na and Yash Chopra's melodramatic Veer-Zaara, both spearheaded by box office badshah Shahrukh Khan, advocated cross-border harmony. Good for everybody. The masses loved the two films and the producers went laughing all the way to the bank.
The yet-to-be-released Rog, produced by Pooja Bhatt, premiered at the Kara Film Festival in Karachi just as her previous film, Paap, had done last year. And there was constant talk of the Pakistani market being opened to Indian films and vice-versa.
The climate generated by the Kargil conflict of 1999 had vanished and it was obvious that films like Gadar - Ek Prem Katha would no longer work. So even the flag-waving Anil Sharma, the perpetrator of that monstrosity of a movie, was compelled backtrack a bit and put a positive spin on his latest war film, Ab Tumhare Hawale Watan Saathiyo. Understandably, the film fell between two stools.
