Celebrating The Goodness

There is just so much panic and depression in the world today. In the race of our lives, we forget to see the goodness around. Going forward on this blog, I intend to focus on all those good parts of life we we tend to ignore. This is not too say I won't be discussing about the ground reality of the world, far from it. But the focus would be more on the good, and perhaps the way ahead on the bad things. 

And to get things started, let me start with the movies. This may well be called the Golden Age of Indian Cinema. We were always a big movie industry by any standards, but lately, we have had many talented directors and script writers who instead of making the usual flicks, are focussing on taking the cinema ahead. Thanks to the multiplex culture, now we have an audience who can enjoy all kinds of cinema. Over the last decade or so, bollywood has been experimenting with some really interesting movies. Be it the Rang De Basanti, which almost inspired a whole nation, or one of the very rare female lead movies Kahani, which proved once again that a everyone appreciates a good cinema, irrespective of the stars. I'm not saying that now all the movies being made a very good, far from it. However, now a days we have at least one movie every few months which promises to take our cinema forward. For every south-indian remake we are making, there is one genuine lovable original also. 

One interesting thing about the recent movies is the grey characters in them - we no longer portray our characters in complete black and white, and there is very little sugar coating of language as well. We are turning back the dream world of Raj Kapoor, and putting our movies back to the reality. Ishaqzaadedidn't harp much on the differences between the religions, and more on the differences between the two families. In the movie, there were no caricatures which have been done to death in our movies, and in spite of dealing with a heavy and touchy subject, it was done very lightly and without being preachy at any point. Its a different matter that the movie left me depressed still, not for any fault of its making, but for the true reality it depicted - the fact that such things are still happening in our country. The sad fact that in a country which perhaps makes the largest number of movies in the whole world, and where more than 80% of movies would be love-stories, in real life we are much more tolerant of corruption than of love marriages. And to some extent the fault lies which the movie makers of yester-years who made such dreamy movies that people never considered them a part of their real lives. Those movies were everyone's getaway from the real world, and not a reflection to build upon. 

We now have movies scaling revenues of 100 Cr on almost regular basis now, and this gives the people associated with the industry much more room and space for experiments. After the initial infatuation with the salaries of stars which have already sky rocketed, some part of the money would be spent on technical aspects of movies as well - in the form of better sets, better camera work, and some time in near future better scripts. Hollywood has a culture of adapting popular novels into movies, and we have made tiny beginnings in that direction by having a few Chetan Bhagat novels being made into movies. Its no wonder that of all the 100 Cr plus hits, the only one which wouldn't make us feel ashamed in front on an international audience is 3 Idiots, which was an amongst the very first bollywood movie which is inspired by a novel.