salaam balak trust

I just happenned to visit Salaam Balak trust for the casting of a film we were shooting. I was amazed at the amount of love and happiness they doled out to everybody who walked in to meet them.

The only thing they were excited about was to get their pictures clicked.. So here they are.

CHAK DE INDIA

Chak de India, directed by Shimit Amin is a very well packaged film keeping in mind the taste of the Indian audience.

Its like serving Indian chinese to them which gets lapped by people of all ages and genres in India.

And the taste works..

Chakde is certainly not the best sports film one would have seen, compared to the internationa standards of sports films. Its an average film, but, a very well acclaimed effort which needs to be applauded. Its an effort out of the realm of the regular masala films which our industry has been serving for long. And it cannot and should not go unnoticed and unappreciated.

The POV of the film keeps changing from characters to characters. The film begins with Kabir Khan the captain of the Indian men's hockey team . Having lost the match against Pakistan he is declared a traitor, only to come back 7 years later, to enroll himself as the coach of the sinking women's hockey team. The screenplay doesn't explain what he had been doing all this while [for 7 years]- except when Kabir says- preparing for this meeting!! Well, need less to add he wants to win back the honour of the people which he had lost for no fault of his.

As the story progresses the POV of the story changes to individual characters some interesting- like Jat girl Kamal chutala, the captian Preeti Sabharwal, Vidya Sharma and Bindiya Naik. The screenplay is sprinkled with their individual cataclysms to broader conflicts of them as a team. And Kabir Khan has to overcome those conflicts, for them, as a coach and that too a shunned one.

The writer has done a commendable job to insinuate an effort to come out with a story that needed to be told. I just wished that it didn't get dreary, predictable and at times cliche.

Also, the film on the whole varies from being dramatic to melodramatic hammering the background music when they wanted to make a point. I wonder does our audience still needs to be shouted and screamed at? Its got ham scenes where Kabir Khan is leaving his house after being thrown from the hockey team ,where the mother is weeping leaving her purkhon ka house and as one woman in the crowd rushes to give them a dabba of rotees, her husband says do you also want to be thrown out? very filmi and melodramatic, but am sure the makers had a reason to add that.

And their reason works.. their cliches work...

And not to forget the film is a hit...

So go for it.. Watch Chakde and make your own judgements!!!

GOING TO SIDDHIVINAYAK TEMPLE

I believe in God. I believe in his energy, the source that helps us get through life.

Recently, I started visiting Siddhivinayak temple. Again. [More precisely after the wall was constructed around it] I thought I had a calling.

I went to the temple on a Friday, albeit the ubiquitous Tuesdays. I was hoping I would get lesser crowd and more time and perhaps special attention from God.

I reached at the time of the Aarti so I like lots of other devotes stood outside seeing the aarti on a plasma TV. I saw the usual indifferent look on Ganesha and wondered, what is the difference between Ganesha you see from your eye lens and the one you see through the camera lens. What is the difference between this Ganesha and the one lying in my house mandir. What’s the difference between this Ganesha and the one in my friend’s cars or in my office?

Aren’t all of them the same?

As I kept my shoes in the one rupee area, I saw the 50 rupees gate shut. Now, fifty rupees gate is the special gate through which anxious people, like me, get to go in quicker.

“Fifty rupees gate shut madame, “ the shoe keeper gleefully said. “Today is less crowd no”

Less crowd! My eyes scanned the long, never-ending line of people in front of me.

“See- See” he pointed at the half filled shoe racks.

I nodded, a bit amused by his calculation. I imagined how would the shoe rack be looking on Tuesdays. Perhaps competing with the mount Everest. I wandered towards the ubiquitous sweet shops aligned in tandem with each other.

A Prasad shop guy came tottering towards me. ‘madame welkom, please come,” Screaming at someone inside his shop he said, “ ah show madame, 120 rupees and 150 rupees baskets,”


“No thank you, “ I quickly said. “ fifty rupees please,”

“Oh make fifty rupees basket for madame,” he added in his usual fancy style of a marketing guru.

They are such excellent sellers, that I wondered what would really happen if they get a MBA degree. I guess survival teaches all of us to become master sellers!! After all it is all about selling at the end of the day. Selling and making money. And then it doesn’t matter what you are selling. It could even be God.

Smilingly, he added “I can get you an entry from the VIP gate. Madam only 100, ruphees.

“1OO!! Why, take 50,”

“No madame, If I take 50, then I will not have anything left, for myself,”

No I wasn’t ready to let people take undue advantage of me, or of God, so I walked ahead.

Another boy came stuttering towards me, “Rs.250 madam only, through the VVIP gate”

Oh, so the rate had increased as I neared the line. I checked my outfit… was I wearing something fancy that they thought I could give them so much money for an entry.

The doors of the mandir were finally opened as the aarti was stopped. I was in the end of the line. Finally the line started moving and to my surprise in 5 minutes I was inside the Mandir. Wow I thought, perhaps I don’t need to get in through the 50 rupees gate any more.

As the swarms of people headed towards the main mandir area where Ganesha was actually sitting, the noises increased. The girls in the next line were randomly chatting about their boy friends, The couple behind me was trying to pacify their agitated daughter. The man in front of me was eyeing the woman in front of him. The girl in front of her was bitching about her new boss. The mandir pujaris were screaming at the top of their voices- chalo chalo, move fast!

And then I started wondering, why did I ever come to the temple. Why does any one come to the temple? Why did these people come to the temple, when they had to get their mundane lives along with them? Where they had to be what they are everywhere?

Why did I come to the temple? What was I doing here? Would God even notice me amongst this huge spectacle of people? I delved into my mind to think of one reason I had come here… And the only reason I could find was that temple was meant to be a place where we could find peace and tranquility. Where you can spend some quality time, alone, with the only energy you believe in and have surrendered to. Where you can shed off all the negativity which has accumulated over the time in your mind and soul, negativity given by the same people who also go to the temple, perhaps the same time and day as you.


“How do you live here?” I looked at Ganesha and wondered.

So much noise, so little peace, so much commercialization.

The entire purpose of going to the temple was defeated. Why do you go the temple? Why did I go to the temple? I am still wondering.

Will I go there again?

I don’t know.

Perhaps wait for another calling!!

HEYY BABBY

I happenned to catch this 'mega' movie on one of lazy sundays in Mumbai. The first thing which struck me was the lavishly shot title track of the film as the norm has started. The producers and distributors have started believing that the lavish shooting of the title track and its use in the promotion of the film, guaratees the film to be hit.

The film began, and it rebegan, The contents of the scene were the same for the next half hour. Three bachelors who have been screwing and living a lavish lifestyle. Yawn..... can we know what is the story please. Yeah and then one fine day a baby arrives at their doorsteps and lo the baby changes their lives, until the real mother of the baby comes and wants to take her back, but by the time they get so hooked to the baby that they can't let her go. wow!! very original. But the fact remains that I have stopped questioning the originality of the contents, as nothing can be original. But something can be original and that is the situations, the characters. ..

But guess this is not how they wanted to go about it.

A trash of a film is declared a hit.

At this rate it seems that we are not going to be heading anywhere in the department of filmmaking, especially regarding the films going international. And worse never make an original film.

This brings me to question the future of Indian films? Is the audience not ready or are we not ready to take chances of making a good film? Do we have it in us to make a good film or not?
Something which is storytelling in pure sense.

Is the lack of real story tellers because there is no one to spot them and bring them to limelight. Or because we donot have the film schools equipped enough to create/ discover great filmmakers or rather can we have film schools in India to create audiences who would be ready to watch films beyond the regular norm of filmmaking.