Bollywood gives a royal salute to Kargil heroes

For a moment even the cops forgot that they were on-duty as they either looked at the stage, spellbound by the psychedelic spectacle being performed before their eyes, or dashed towards the stage every time a starmade an appearance. Until of course they were admonished by their seniors, who had to literally push them to get on with their work. Johnny Lever drew loud cheers for his usual imitation of the accent of popular actors like Nana Patekar, Dev Anand and Mithun Chakrabarty. He enacted an imaginary situation in which each of them goes with a swagger to fight in Kargil only to be met with hilarious failures.

The funniest was when cricketer Srinath goes to fight in Kargil. Given a grenade to throw at the enemy by a jawan, Srinath confidently takes it, only to pull out the pin and — in keeping with his sports habit — begins rubbing the round grenade on his thigh before throwing it like a cricket ball! The result is, expectedly, a badly injured Srinath. The moral: Cricketers and stars are good only in their own fields. The moment they enter alien territory, the result is disastrous.

Following this rule, the entertainers judiciously put in their contributions by sticking to entertainment: Usha Utthup wascrooning Yeh dosti and Udit Narayan and Sadhna Sargam Pehla pyar, pehla nasha. On the other hand, Sunil Shetty enacted the song sequence of J P Dutta’s Border, Anupam Kher, the man behind the Aye watan tere liye was seen busily running around with a sheaf of papers, from backstage to frontstage, while Rani Mukherjee in her broken voice recited a poem by her father.

Javed Akhtar enthralled with some shayari and informed the audience how he had the fortune of travelling with the Prime Minister on the Lahore bus trip and was delighted to find a groundswell of good feeling among the ordinary citizens for our country.

If the packed stadium was any indication, the show celebrated the spirit of India, post-Kargil. And, yes, the spirit and the show will go on.