The man on the street takes centrestage as cinema celebrates his life and times Even Aditya Chopra couldn’t resist it. He had to give us the real Raj, he had to introduce us to Surinder Sahni, your regular bumbling, fumbling simple guy next door trying real hard just to get acquainted with life. Most of the times, he does. There is a round of knockouts first, but eventually, he manages to make best friends out of it. Mr Khosla and his family did, Amar Kaul made a checklist and gave it a big bear hug of a goodbye, Satyaveer did full justice to it, so did Naseer in A Wednesday, while Lucky’s busy enjoying chasing it. Ordinary lives have never been so ‘extraordinaire’, and if we connect them to the cinema circuit, then for the thinker, the writer, the creator, the common man’s common life has suddenly become very, very important. His own life may seem pretty insignificant to him, but to the ones who are running this ‘Truman’ show, the man on the street is their muse, their masala, their TRP meter, their moolah and their movie. “For a while, we had stopped portraying the common man. We had got lost in glamour and heroism, in selling the larger than life scoop of cinema, but now, there are so many stories to tell, to write, to project, and interestingly, all of them are relateable characters,” says Abhay Deol, who feels closest to his ‘detective’ character, Satyaveer in Manorama Six Feet Under. His Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, in fact, is inspired from a real life story. “I guess the formula is overdone, it’s time to give the audience their story,” he dimples. And their story we are giving, with a little twist of course. Roti, kapda aur makaan is out. Mounting loans, unpaid bills, extra marital affairs, college romances, dyslexic kids, bully builders, terrorist encounters are in. Remember Life in a Metro, A Wednesday and Rock On? It’s not that the common man got completely wiped out in the starry crowds. We’ve always had glimpses of our common ‘heroes’ - Amol Palekar as the legendary Ram Pratap, Sanjeev Kumar as the pipe smoking rifle shooting mad Colonel Mangal Singh, Utpal Dutt at his quirky best, Raj Kapoor in his Charlie Chaplin-esque avataar, Farooq Sheikh.Films and filmmakers too were portraying him, picking up on issues relevant to him - joint family, moral values, unemployment, politics of change.”We’ve had the common man’s cinema, but somewhere along came the dreamer’s cinema with its big glossy picture and real life took a backseat,” observes Khosla Ka Ghosla director Dibakar Bannerjee. However, all was not lost for every Raj Kapoor or Yash Chopra there was a Bimal Roy and Hrishikesh Mukherjee, people still remember their works despite the commercial weekend hits,” adds Dibakar. Today, he feels, the audience doesn’t want to eat the same pie. “They want emotions instead of sentimentality, beautiful instead of plain pretty. They are feeling bloated with what’s being force fed and so they are insisting for something that’s nice, light and simple with that feel good factor,” says Dibakar. The result - eye candy’s snubbed and alternative makes its way in with its oddballs and screwballs, mad underdogs who take the risk, bend the rules and win the game. And by jove, the audiences have lapped it up! “I relate to the common man, I understand their failings, nuances, emotions, needs, dilemmas, and my reference point in cinema, in acting has always been people. The characters I portray spring from real life,” says the common man’s actor, Anupam Kher. Although Vinay Pathak wants to demolish all labels, he confesses that he enjoys portraying characters that are closest to life. “It’s like phatta poster, nikla hero,” he smiles. For Guneet Monga, co-producer on Dasvidanya, 2010 is going belong to realistic, funny, thought provoking cinema. As we surf channels and stumble upon trailers like those of Luck By Chance and Meerabai Not Out, we can’t help but nod our heads in agreement. We are after all binded by that one common factor.
