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Grey mindset
Rang de Basanti was given a strange treatment in Sagarika Ghose?s column (Rang de Bizarre, February 21), writes Suparna Sharma.
Rang de Basanti was given a strange treatment in Sagarika Ghose’s column (Rang de Bizarre, February 21).
Ghose most certainly had not watched the movie. She over-simplified the issues and ignored the movie’s main aspects — the MiG tragedy, peaceful protests, corrupt politicians, Hindu-Muslim tension and party politics. Instead, she fixes her attention on things that didn’t even exist in the movie, like the Grand Canyon and some unfathomable media bashing.
Ghose talks of ‘five’ college guys, although there were four. The fifth person was an outsider. She talks of the Grand Canyon as an Indian bauli. The pillared palace that she mentions is like any ‘Type A’ house in Lutyens’ Delhi. Finally, she says “we never know” if the five (it’s four) care about the fighter pilot. But it’s amply clear to ‘us’ that they do. Neither do they decide to “immediately” murder the defence minister, as she has written.
The facts were distorted to fit Ghose’s arguments.
All this followed up by a completely banal treatise on the media, janta
and reality.
The article rants that the movie is playing to an audience “catastrophically distant from reality”. But may I point out that the columnist failed to recall the names of the five freedom fighters in the movie and dismissed them dispassionately — naming two as if the other three don’t matter, although Rajguru, Bismil and Ashfak are equally important.
Ghose, understandably, can’t relate to youth alienation. A trip to Delhi University, or any other university in India, might be a good starting point. What inspires the writer to imagine that the movie is about Indian media fails imagination. She jumps from “Javed Akhtar says…” to an ode to Sholay to an unsolicited apology for the media. Hello? Why Sholay? Was that perhaps the last Hindi movie the writer watched?
Rang De Basanti is a movie most of us, the brown-faced crowd in Delite and Sangam, watched and enjoyed. It’s a great movie with great actors, great songs. Ghose and those who agree with her viewpoint must watch it as a mainstream Bollywood movie. And save the seminal thesis on 24-hour news channels for the next grey-haired seminar.
