When terror strikes a city, it doesn’t just destroy the infrastructure. It damages its soul. That’s what happened on 9 That’s what happened on March 12, 1993 in India. It struck at Bombay’s famed infallibility, its celebrated cosmopolitanism. It harmed Bombay’s bindaas attitude, putting the oft-repeated slogan Bombay Meri Jaan on its head.Which is why I went to see Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday, based on journalist S. Hussain Zaidi’s book by the same name, with great expectations. It disappointed me. So did it many others who thronged its exclusive screening at the recently concluded Mumbai Film festival.The film’s flaws don’t lie in its retelling of the facts. It faithfully records events before and after the serial blasts. The gory pictures, the torture chambers, the third degree methods applied to seek confessions.But the film miserably fails to be different from the usual C-grade Bollywood masala movies when it portrays Muslims. Through cliched dialogues and screenplay, Black Friday repeats the stereotypes about Muslims.Before one saw this film, one had never heard of good-hearted cops who quote Islamic virtues to misguided Muslim criminals. The classic scene is the one where a senior police officer confronts a criminal: “Tumhara khuda tumhare saath nahin tha (Your God was not with you).”The attempt to link a dastardly act of terror with the alleged pan-Islamic conspiracy to annihilate India defeats the film’s purpose. Yes, an aggrieved Tiger Memon went to Karachi and colluded with the ISI in engineering the blasts. And Dawood Ibrahim exploited some agitated Muslim youths’ sentiments to avenge the December 1992 and January 1993 riots. But since when did Dawood become the messiah of the Muslims?As per the script, Islam would have been wiped out from India if some Muslim boys hadn’t shown the courage to strike at India’s soul — Bombay. Interestingly, the film begins and ends with Gandhi’s words: “An eye for an eye blinds the whole world.” Yet, it conveys little beyond reprisals, violence, a frozen community that ditched Allah for a don in Dubai.For someone who admired Anurag Kashyap for elegantly scripting Ram Gopal Varma’s hit Satya, I am appalled at how the scriptwriter in him lost touch this time. The publicity posters claim it as “the true story of the Bombay bomb blasts.” But the truth lacks punch. It suffers from the usual maladies that afflict action flicks of our film factory.America turned out in droves to see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9 I doubt if even Mahim — where Tiger Memon resided — will show up for Black Friday. George W. Bush reportedly lost sleep over Moore’s scathing indictment of his administration. One can’t guarantee even murmurs in the corridors of power in India over Black Friday.
