Entertainment and Us

Lage Raho Munnabhai captures gandhi as a ghost from the past. Both as a part of the plot as well as the larger message that it delivers. Gandhi today, is just a ghost from the past. But attributing the soul of a nation to a single person is utter nonsense. Gandhi himself said: "I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and non-violence are as old as hills."

The media needs some masala to latch onto and produce kilobytes out of that. Producers are not complaining though as any publicty that comes for free is welcome. More so, because filmi munna is awaiting real world justice very shortly. Today only, a lady in our organisation suggested a gandhigiri for pigeonhole mailbox cluttered with mail. The idea was to individually deliver the uncollected mail with a 'gandhigiri' thankyou note. The 'Gandhigiri' idea has been taken from the story of a person who was travelling to meet Gandhi (incidentally, with Gandhi travelling in same compartment). He was continuosly spitting and gandhi picked the spit each time. well, what gandhi did was because of a genuine inner feeling. If one tries to recollect, one may find other such instances of getting the best out of others by genuinely replying negative actions with positive ones. But if one tries to fake oneself and do 'gandhigiri' because some gandhigiri guy has preached it to one it seems like pure arrogance. Hence neither will it bear any positive results nor will it be sustainable. The 'get well soon' message seems to be an agonising taunt and not a genuine concern for a sick person.
The advice to the taxi driver and the bride is no different than what any sane agony aunt will give.
The human values that this movie portrays are in no way different than those shown in previous munnabhai: the dignity of labor(the sweeper), the respect for human life(the suicide attempt), the dislike for silly bureacratic procedure(filling forms while a person dies), raising voice against dehumanising a person by making him a 'subject' (anand bhai the 'mental'). Gandhi would have stood by all of these values. Only difference is that brand mahatma and gandhigiri was not there last time.
An interesting question to ask would be that how is this movie doing in pakistan? I guess not so good as the previous one. Because 'their' values are different than ours. For 'them', gandhi does not exist: neither as a ghost nor as a thinker. Thanks to 'their' 'education system' the memory of entire generation of our common freedom fighters has been wiped off. As against last time, there have been no reports of munnabhai in pakistan. Is it the book of musharraf or 'gandhigiri' which is the reason? or maybe bhailog is too busy analysing bombay bomb blast verdict to have found time to smuggle the 'useless' movie to Pakistan?

Posted by bagdu on Wednesday, October 11, 2006 at 6:51 AM | Permalink