At the International Film Festival of India being held in Goa, Information and Broadcasting Minister M Venkaiah Naidu urged filmmakers to make movies that preserve “our values and traditions”. Lamenting the new crop of movies as needlessly explicit, he referenced old Indian cinema that relied “on actors’ expressions” to portray sweet longing. “Filmmakers are becoming too lazy and the content is bearing the consequences,” said Naidu to a crowd of a few hundred people. He went on to add that our films should promote gender justice, respect for elders and humanism (The Indian Express, November 21, 2016). Mr. Naidu is entitled to his opinion — and so far, filmmakers are entitled to reject it. One of the lesser perks (I’m sure) of being the I & B Minister is that you get to stand on a podium and expostulate on what makes for good and bad cinema (without ever having made a movie or having any experience working as a critic). No doubt, Mr. Naidu feels nostalgic for films from his youth, when tales of calamity and grinding poverty were the norm. For the generation growing up in the ’60’s and ’70’s, a visit to the hall meant endless weeping, but there was so little to do in terms of entertainment that they went anyway. Take Dosti, the 1964 superhit about a friendship between two boys, one blind, the other a cripple. The greatest moment of levity is when they make money by teaming up to sing, but somebody steals it when they’re sleeping on the footpath. It’s the kind of movie that makes you want to shoot yourself but it resonated with a struggling, newly independent nation. Us, the heirs of liberalisation, have been exposed to more nuanced despair in Indian films. There’s an audience for depictions of urban angst, with the just released Dear Zindagi, and an equally large one for the gritty realism of Udta Punjab. However, it’s getting worryingly tougher for all types of movies to flourish in an atmosphere of underlying cultural coercion. A film can get derailed anytime since India seems to be constantly in the zone of perilous political uncertainty. After the Uri attack, Karan Johar was forced to declare he wouldn’t work with Pakistani artistes, since the MNS threatened to ban his film Ae Dil Hai Mushkil. Rock On 2 had the spectacular bad luck of releasing on November 11, three days after demonetisation when citizens were still reeling from the shock. Along with so many other businesses, this has had devastating consequences for the film industry. In Goa, Mr. Naidu suggested filmmakers connect two R’s: reason and reality. Who knows, a future script may have a love story of a chance meeting in one of the endless queues outside a bank. Since the Indian viewer has been known to be an escapist dreamer, it’s best to gloss over those collapsing to death there.
