A friend who calls himself an adventurer once told me that entertainment influences the explorer within and actualizes the creative genes fastest.
‘Reading? I asked.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘that helps. Though watching films is easier now and has a faster rate of conversion into actionable decisions.’ So yes, films do help us discover our potential effectively… and I guess they also make the mind dance better. Thoughts awaken, ideas germinate, and if I were to ask a yogi he would tell me that even the kundalini of creativity gets activated. I know that when I sit in front of the television at home and push my fire-stick to zip into Zee5, for instance, I’m in a different world. This is my world where I sit watching, hearing, analyzing… and making notes. Come on, we are living in a broadband-rich era and to watch Bollywood movies online is a far more attractive proposition than going out hunting for the right tickets in some far-away cinema. Not that we cease to be hunters at home in front of the television… it is this hunt for the right panacea for the body, mind, and soul that led me to Sonchiriya, Simmba, Uri, and Kedarnath. We, the movie buffs are the modern day hunters who get their sustenance from films.
For the statistically inclined, the top 50 films had 97.75 percent of the total net box office collection in 2017 and this has only got better. This also means that one must choose his films well if the hunter-instinct within is to be triggered. I’m not surprised that I began with URI.
Uri: The Surgical Strike, the movie is based on the September 2016 surgical strikes as the appropriate response to the terror attack at Uri. The hunter instinct gets a boost as one watches the characters focus on their mission. Concepts like immediacy of building the right team, conversations directed towards the goal, emotions converging towards completing the task, breaking up the task into actionable chunks and, most importantly, showing minor details that make the final objective crystal clear are things that impressed the writer within me. Besides this, it was the futility of encouraging terror and way this promotes incomprehensible conclusions that lead nations away from economic prosperity are facets that the movie helps putting in perspective. Yes, the hunter within was happy that I decided to watch this one.
Ranveer Singh and Sara Ali Khan in Simmba are representative of testosterone-buildups in a rather different way. Being street-smart and fond of macho posturing, Ranveer finally gets to find his hunter-instinct and even Sara gets to go beyond lip-service to an inherited aura of bravery to show that hunting for criminal behaviour involves a bunch of strategic innovations in ideas. Yes, the writer in me loved the one-liners and the gonads-ticklish gyrations besides the way destiny works its way to give the hero all the right breaks after a mandatory period of struggle. As Carroll Bryant puts it, this is why ‘luck is the bastard child of fate and destiny’. This movie led me to understand in more than one way, that first impressions about any character can be misleading and only deeper conversations hold the key to knowing them better… something that fascinated the hunter in me.
Sonchiriya is a 1970s-set film and takes a viewer back to the ravines of Chambal. Phuliya, a character in the movie, reminds a viewer of Phoolan Devi and Manoj Bajpayee is the dreaded dacoit Maan Singh, to give you some lead. The movie meanders through a bouquet of fatal blunders and bad decisions and creates ‘a vivid metaphor for the precariousness of the way of the outlaw‘ as one reviewer on Scroll puts it. The movie is a veritable treasure for those hunting for tips and clues to lead them out of an impossible situation… and this is one reason why I just loved watching it.
The next film that I intend to talk about is Kedarnath that effectively brought in the contentious issue of environmental degradation because of business instincts demanding and working to attract more tourists. Yes, the film does weave in the age-old theme of lovers from two different religions but I liked the way responsible tourism development was picked up and a dialogue introduced as eco-tourism as something that needs to be seriously addressed by us. The movie, however, is as much about eco-tourism being subtly introduced as it is about life in and around Kedarnath, the way romance in a rural setting is now almost forgotten by Bollywood, and songs that are utterly hummable. If you ask me if the hunter within was nudged, I’d say yes, it was… after all, the writer in me has been hunting all this while for ideas that bring together the music of life and the harsh fiscal realities that besiege it. The film makes you think on multiple levels.
The rise of sit-at-home and watch films
Statistically, the Indian film industry is expected to grow at 11.5% year-on-year but the figures that interested me revolved around the television and the films that we get to see because of the sound broadband bandwidth. For TV, the stats shot up from 21% in 2015 to 24% in 2018 and are still showing no signs of slowing down, according to BARC data. So basically, the future is brilliantly lit. The aam junta is loving this deluge on their TV screens and most are obviously sitting comfortably as they hunt for nuggets that will make their lives better.
Yes, the hunter instinct is more active than it ever was… and decades ago even Walt Disney had said that films entertain and people learned something than the other way round that was to educate people and hope they were entertained. I’d say I agree with him.
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Arvind Passey
23 May 2019
