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No Holds Barred - Back-biting In Bollywood
A Subhash K Jha Exclusive
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You can’t bitch a classic out. No matter how hard you try to suppress it a work of art will speak to the audience and lodge itself in the audiences’ hearts.
 Meet Sunil Seth. He became a known name for all times to come when on Tuesday he issued a full-page ad in Mid-day expressing his love for Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s BLACK. In doing so Mr Seth tripped over himself and named a crop of recent films that he called... well, mediocre in comparison.
All hell has broken lose since then. Filmmakers whose films have been mentioned in terms of mediocrity have gone on a bitching spree. Topping the hate list is the ever-vocal Mahesh Bhatt who thinks Sanjay Leela Bhansali has issued the ad to confirm his own supremacy as a filmmaker.
Oh come on, Mr Bhatt! Genius needs no plugging, specially not from the individual owning that quality. How many films and filmmakers possess the quality of genius anyway?
 And if to the detached and completely non-filmy person MURDER seems mediocre in comparison to BLACK, what’s wrong with that? Does Mr Bhatt actually think MURDER to be a masterpiece when we all know it ran because of Mallika Sherawat’s twin assets. And I don’t mean her talent and charisma.
Let me go the other way. Let me point out to Mr Bhatt in how many ways MURDER appears ineffectual and mediocre in comparison with BLACK. For one Mr Bhatt’s film was a total rehash of a Hollywood film. And unoriginal films can stake no claims to longevity.
When was the last time Mr Bhatt actually did a decent film? I know of horrific stories of his directorial laxity. I know how intense and severe were the losses of producer Yash Johar (may God rest his soul) during DUPLICATE. The truth is, Mr Bhatt wouldn’t turn up to direct his own picture!
Today of course he would like to think of himself as the champion of the downtrodden. Any worthy cause, and he’s right up at front. It could be death of Parveen Babi (oh the lost cause, the lost soul!) or it could be forum discussing the persecution of the Muslim community.
Mr Bhatt loves to be in the thick of thorny issues.
But isn’t he a filmmaker first? When was the last time he made a decent film? After ARTH and SARAANSH, he did only one above ordinary film… ZAKHAM, which was the autobiographical story of Mr. Bhatt’s Muslim mother.
ARTH, as we all know, was ‘inspired’ by Parveen Babi just as MURDER was inspired by Mallika Sherawat. Somewhere the life that Mr Bhatt creates on screen has a bearing on his own life. Otherwise it doesn’t work. DUPLICATE didn’t work. There were no more stories for him to borrow from his life. So he quit.
Sanjay Leela Bhansali has already told four stories. Today it’s easy for the fans of BLACK to turn around and acknowledge him as a master creator when in fact he has been one all along. Each one of Bhansali’s four celluloid creations are imperishable works of art and none of them seeks direct inspiration from his own life.
Of course fragments of self-float in Bhansali’s fabulous firmament. But nothing as blatantly second hand as what Mahesh Bhatt does in his films.
 I’ve had heated arguments with Mr Bhatt about art and its true nature. He believes there’s nothing like an original work of art. He forgets Satyajit Ray’s PATHER PANCHALI, Ritwick Ghatak’s MEGHE DHAKA TARA , K Asif’s MUGHAL-E-AZAM, Shyam Benegal’s ANKUR... and now Bhansali’s BLACK. These are truly master creations and a joy forever because they don’t derive their inspiration from secondary sources - Hollywood or or any other wood. They go straight into the deep forest of life to come up with solutions to life’s abiding mysteries. They are true works of art.
Why is a section of the film industry loath to acknowledge the true achievement of Sanjay Leela Bhansali? Why are the mediocre sections of filmmakers so threatened by BLACK? Could it because they know that now their game is back? That the audience won’t bear with their whimpering collections of haphazard collages that they call cinema?
In this context I love Sanjay Gadhvi’s reaction to the ad in favour of BLACK. Said the director, "I think Black is a brilliant film and 98 percent of the directors are wishing they could be Sanjay Leela Bhansali."
Bravo, Mr Gadhvi. It takes a man of integrity to acknowledge another creator’s achievement. I think the film industry needs to understand that a celebration of the overpowering presence of BLACK doesn’t cut into the average film’s place in the market. What it does is to make the audience and therefore the filmmaker more quality-conscious.
 Dino Morea who has a release CHEHRAA coming up this week is a worried man. "Every week there’re 2-3 releases. It’s insane! How can the audience be expected to digest so many films, most of them unpalatable? We’ve to stop being so self-defeating."
Is Bollywood listening? Or are all the filmmakers too busy feeling sorry for themselves to pay attention?
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