Jolly good show

You may grumble yourself into the ground that magic realism wasn8217;t the invention of Latin American writers but of these clever and purp...

You may grumble yourself into the ground that magic realism wasn8217;t the invention of Latin American writers but of these clever and purposeful gents who cooked up the Puranas, but there, the only people who8217;ll listen are the nutters and the babajis.

When it comes to movies, though, do you really care about whose film makes news, so long as we have a good time? The genre of the mythological movie hasn8217;t seen much action here in a long while after Jai Santoshi Ma, thanks to the religious teleserials that lit up the eighties and part of the nineties. Thereafter, religion became our Most Embarrassing Subject so much so that a few years ago, some people in Kerala actually fought against the staging of Andrew Lloyd Weber8217;s amazing rock opera, Jesus Christ Superstar 8212; the very opera that St Xavier8217;s School, Delhi, staged in 1974 and Theatre Action Group produced a year later, directed by Barry John, both to the greatest acclaim. You had to hug to yourself those lovely, often absurd but wholly endearing memories of 8216;Bhakti films8217; that enlivened your childhood and snicker in turn when reading disapproving intellectualisations of the first Indian movie being Dada Saheb Phalke8217;s Raja Harischandra 8212; also the first film in several regional Indian languages.

Well, today, thanks to the worldwide publicity about the late Pope and bestsellers like The Da Vinci Code, religion and mythology are suddenly very hip and cool again as legit creative subjects.

The Da Vinci Code will take a year to appear in its film avatar and last year saw Mel Gibson8217;s controversial The Passion of the Christ, which disturbed many by its lingering crucifixion scenes. Coming up from Hollywood now are a bunch of movies on Catholic faith themes, principally: The Kingdom of Heaven with Orlando Bloom and Teresa of Avila played by Paz Vega. Meanwhile a popular American TV mini-series seems to be Revelations, about a nun helping delay the end of the world, while Saint Ralph is a movie in which Campbell Scott helps a Catholic schoolboy towards a sports miracle. I can8217;t see anyone in our hyper country though, allowing the making of a film like Our Fathers in which Ted Danson confronts the church about its sex-abuse scandal. Or even a new millennium Sita8217;s Story in which she tells the dhobi and everyone in Ayodhya what she really thinks of them.

The next best thing for Indian cinema now might be to make a new genre, the Modern Mythological. Scripts in which contemporary people having a bad time pray to the colony Ganesha for a deus ex machina. A flower falls from his trunk and strange, wonderful things begin to happen. Mr Johar? Mr Bansali? Are you reading this? I have this really wild idea8230;