Greed is (Now) Good

My piece for the Indian Express Eye's Diwali issue on money.

Once, bad guys had all the cash. But like the audience, contemporary Hindi cinema has learnt to listen respectfully when money does the talking.

Raj Kapoor and Nadira in the magisterial Shree 420

What can one say about the changing status of money in Hindi films? First off, I suppose, that there’s more of it on screen than there used to be. Unlike the largely well-off heroes of today, the protagonists of so many 1950s and ’60s classics were either born into poverty, or had it thrust upon them — their heroism was often about earning enough to survive, and trying to stay honest while they did so. This was true whether the film was set in the village or the city. The characters played by Nargis in Mother India, Dilip Kumar in Naya Daur or Guru Dutt in Pyaasa were all about maintaining their moral fibre despite all manner of tragedies. Money would not, could not sway them from their scruples — which might involve the defence of chastity, community, or artistic integrity. Another kind of hero was allowed to be more fallible, and we watched as he struggled to keep his conscience in a world jingling with monetary temptation: think of Dev Anand in Baazi (1951), House No. 44 (1955), Guide (1965) or Jewel Thief (1967), or Raj Kapoor in Awara (1951) or Shree 420 (1955).

It is not surprising that in both categories, those who already had money were usually villains, feudal or capitalist: the lecherous baniya Sukhilala, unmoved by the sufferings of Nargis and her children; the crooked city-returned Kundan (Jeevan) in Naya Daur, so keen to capitalise on technology that he would destroy a whole village economy; the publisher Ghosh (Rehman) in Pyaasa, so avid in his pursuit of profit that he conspires to have a man locked up and declared dead. As long as the Hindi film hero was a struggler, the rich man was likely to be a source of corruption, or conflict, or both — think of Seth Sonachand in Shree 420, who tries his best to turn the honest Raj to crime by means of the glittering Nadira, whose character is literally named Maya: illusion.

When it was playing things lighter, popular Hindi cinema sold an alternative fantasy to its largely working-class audiences: here the hero who was poor would eventually luck out, either by discovering that he was high-born and thus an heir to great wealth, or by getting the pretty rich girl anyway. But, usually, unless he was the father of the hero or the heroine (and sometimes even then), the big man in the palatial Hindi film home was always guilty until proven innocent, slimy until proven straight. In that cinematic universe, even villains conceded that money was always ill-gotten: “Daulat ka pedh jab bhi ugta hai, paap ki zameen mein hi ugta hai (The tree of wealth always grows in the soil of sin),” as Amjad Khan declared in Kaalia (1981).

The Amitabh Bachchan era marked a partial shift in this valorising of mehnat ki mazdoori. To be sure, Bachchan did carry on a certain kind of socialist film tradition as the labouring hero battling crooked capitalists — Coolie (1983) is perhaps the most memorable example. But he also embodied the intense disillusionment of the 1970s and ’80s, lending his baritone to a growing rage against a world in which the straight and narrow was beginning to seem a path to eternal poverty. Still, the Bachchan hero’s pursuit of wealth was never just about the good life — he might seem coolly stylish, even shaukeen, but the money was really meant to plug the gaping emotional hole in his soul. In Trishul (1978), for instance, his creation of a business empire is really about destroying the man who once abandoned his pregnant mother; in Deewar (1975), his quest for riches is a way of avenging the poverty of his childhood. But as that film’s classic Salim-Javed dialogue made abundantly clear to the millions who grew up on it, money couldn’t buy you love. “Aaj mere paas buildingey hai, property hai, bank balance hai, bangla hai, gaadi hai. Kya hai, kya hai tumhare paas?” demands a belligerent Bachchan of his honest policeman brother (Shashi Kapoor), only to be crushed by the retort “Mere paas Maa hai.” The very vocabulary of trade was a tainted one: as Nirupa Roy says plaintively to Bachchan in the same film: “Tu bahut bada saudagar hai re, lekin apni maa ko khareedne ki koshish mat kar. (You’re a big businessman, but don’t try to buy your mother.)”

The years after liberalisation have changed our cinema a great deal, as they have changed us. From clapping for the self-made Bachchan hero who refuses phenke huye paise in Deewaar or rises in rage in Trishul at the idea that his ambitions might stem from having come into his baap dada ki daulat, we have reached a stage where we can smile indulgently at Ranbir Kapoor when he introduces himself to Konkona Sensharma in Wake Up Sid (2009) with “Main? Main apne dad ke paise kharch karta hoon (Me? I spend my dad’s money).”

It is now alright to have money, as well as to aspire to it. And the making of money need no longer be couched as serving some emotional need — the ends can often justify the means. In Mani Ratnam’s Guru (2007), the capitalist who smuggles in machine parts and manipulates the stock market — a screen character rather closely allied to the real-life Dhirubhai Ambani — is no longer the villain but the hero. More recently, in Raees (2016), a liquor-selling ganglord is presented to us as the heroic outcome of an entrepreneurial society where the independent single mother — an updated Nirupa Roy character — is now one who teaches her son that no business is too small, and no religion is bigger than business. “Hamare liye koi koi bhi dhandha chhota nahi hota, aur dhandhe se bada koi dharam nahi hota.”

Such money-making baniya heroes are still infrequent. Barring the steady trickle of small-town/middle class films, Bollywood seems to reflect the wide disparity created by money in the new India. On the one hand are the likes of Saif Ali Khan, Ranbir Kapoor or the newly-arrived Barun Sobti playing the haves, whose search for selfhood involves looking beyond money (Chef, Tamasha, Tu Hai Mera Sunday). The other features the have-nots, for whom money would remain out of reach if they stayed honest, must either win world-scale lotteries as Emraan Hashmi-style confidence men, or steal, as in Oye Lucky Lucky Oye or Simran, or — as in the Anurag Kashyap gangster film — sell their souls into violent crime.

Published in the Indian Express, 15 October 2017.

The Confidence Man

Yesterday's Mumbai Mirror column:

Emraan Hashmi has perfected a persona whose unapologetic appetite for the good life (both sex and money) makes him a rarity in Bollywood - and crucial to it.

Emraan Hashmi is Bollywood's under-acknowledged seamy side. Over his decade in the film industry, he has built a massive devoted fan following. Most of his films come from the Mahesh-Mukesh Bhatt stable, (Mahesh Bhatt's mother and Hashmi's grandmother were sisters, and Emraan began his career assisting on Vishesh Films' Raaz). 

Many of them are franchises - films that bear a common name and broad theme (Raaz, Jannat, Murder), but whose plots, narratives and cast changes completely from one film to another. The one thing that unites them is Emraan. 

We're talking of an actor who is the main draw for a stream of films that are as close to dependable moneymakers as is possible at our notoriously fickle box office. And yet he and his films are barely mentioned in the growing list of synthesizing books about Bollywood, or the column inches regularly devoted to the transformation of Hindi cinema. We go on about the 100 crore club, and act as if the Bhatt films don't really count. 

Yet Hashmi is probably among the most successful leading men in the industry. And more importantly, he has a persona that seems to give him rather more moral leeway than most mainstream heroes still have. 

I'm not talking just of erotic action, which has been almost expected of Hashmi ever since his breakthrough hit Murder (2004) saddled him with the silly 'serial kisser' tag. But his characters do enjoy a degree of sexual openness rare in Bollywood; his audience seems to forgive him whether he is a frequenter of whores (as in Jannat 2), the obsessive stalker of another man's wife (as in Murder), or the rakish lover who dismisses the heartbroken woman he's been sleeping with for three years as an "aadat, aur kucch nahin" (as in Murder 2). 

The films themselves are less judgmental or apologetic about sex than most of contemporary Bollywood, where sex still must come attached to love. A Murder may not advocate an extramarital affair, but it seems to understand it. Murder 2 by no means romanticises the flesh trade, but its money-minded pimps and resigned call girls produce a slightly less black-and-white version of that world than say, a Mardaani. 

The moral leeway with regard to sex is even greater when it comes to money. Hashmi is always a smooth-talking hustler. And he's always the lower middle class man with a heart of gold -- at least as far as the poor and the "deserving" are concerned. But whether he's a small-time cardsharp or pulling off multimillion dollar cons, he is never plagued by high-minded ideas about honesty. Not for him the staid middle class job, or even the relative risks of binness (think a Rocket Singh or a Band Baaja Baraat). 

No, for Emraan it must be a gamble, and with the highest stakes. "Jeb khali ho tabhi toh sapnein dekhne chahiye (It's when your pockets are empty that you should dream)," says his character in an early scene in Jannat (2008). A little later in the same film, he falls in love with a girl wandering through a mall because of the sadness on her face as she admires objects she can't afford. Their whirlwind romance involves his using his roommate's flat deposit to buy her a diamond ring he saw her gazing at, then swamping her telephone-shopping helpline with so many credit card purchases that her monthly target is met in an hour. Their first romantic duet involves sneaking into a shuttered Home Store and trampolining on a display bed that has 'Sale 20%' off signs all around it. 

Hashmi's hero is always out to inhabit the good life - beaches, yachts, fast cars and beautiful women, whom he wines and dines and most crucially, beds, in immaculate hotel rooms from Turkey to Capetown. "People who save money are those who don't know how to make enough of it," says Raja in this week's Raja Natwarlal. But even if they don't necessarily make an appearance - like in the joyous heist pulled off in Raja Natwarlal - there are hidden costs to this good life. So Emraan Hashmi's cinema toggles constantly between a surface sheen and the darkness that is its necessarily obverse - porn, sex work, adultery, trafficking, kidnapping, murder. 

Credit is what makes this world go round. Dons show their creditors 'trailers' of the violence that awaits them if they default on payments (Jannat). Loving mentors might only be pretending to tot up loans in blank notebooks (Raja Natwarlal), but even unwritten debts can accumulate. "A man's body burns when he dies, but not his debts," goes a dialogue in Murder 2. 

I wonder if the films of Emraan Hashmi are the 21st century inheritor of the 70s Amitabh Bachchan legacy: the bad boy with a good heart, who wants to live the good life at any cost. Only the bets are bigger, and the heroines purer arm candy, who must ask no questions about the provenance of the money showered on them. 

Two things have changed, though. One, it no longer matters that he doesn't have Ma (in fact parents are usually long dead, unable to stop our hero hurtling into his future). And two, he doesn't have to die at the end. Instead of Bachchan's celebrated tragic deaths, Emraan Hashmi has perfected the art of staging his own death. Plenty to think about there.

Film Review: Raaz 3

Oh, Raaz 3 had so much going for it. A plotline about an older actress threatened by the rise of a younger one seems even more contemporary now than it did in 1950, when All About Eve first came out. And a spoilt, self-obsessed, uber-ambitious Bipasha Basu as reigning Bollywood heroine Shanaya Shekhar (look, people, this is fiction); a puppydog-eyed Emraan Hashmi as her secret squeeze; and a nubile nymphet who’s stealing Bipasha’s awards (and boyfriend) from under her nose – what could be a better setting for a steamy saga of professional and sexual jealousy? It’s almost a tale meant for black magic.

Read the whole review here on Firstpost:

Film Review: Jannat 2 is just bad, not badass

In the first scene of Jannat 2, a small-time crook is cornered by an angry creditor in an Old Delhi gali. The creditor pulls a gun on him, but our hero isn’t scared in the least. He takes one look at the weapon being aimed at him, dismisses its low quality in impressive detail, and before you know it, has managed to sell the man his own (far cooler) gun – making a neat getaway and a profit. Meet Sunil Dhariwal, alias Sonu Dilli, KKC. Um, yes, Kutti Kameeni Cheez.

As you can probably tell from that moniker plastered all over the promos, the makers of Jannat 2 have their hopes pinned on some generic idea of badass-ness, which they pray will be filled out by the figure of Emraan Hashmi in a leather jacket and a laid-on-thick Dilli accent.

Even more than its 2008 predecessor, Jannat 2 rides on the proven ability of its louche leading man to play the streetsmart fixer with a heart of gold. He may unzip his trousers as casually for paid sex as he does to go to the loo, but really, we know he’s just waiting for true love.

So that when he meets perfectly coiffed medico Jahnvi (played by Miss India Esha Gupta: “Yeh doctorni hai ya jadugarni?”), we’re not at all surprised that all his kutte-kameene life plans are swiftly abandoned for a vision of cosy domesticity “jahan nahaane ke baad towel bhi sahi jagah pe rakhna padta hai nahi toh daant padti hai”.

Unfortunately, the romance feels as fake as the doctorni herself. The overblown quality of the first encounter or two can be put down to Bollywood rules and thus even enjoyed. Sadly, though, our leading lady’s implausibly overdressed hospital avatar is only a prelude to the tacky georgette saris and cleavage-revealing bustiers in which she must henceforth appear, as if embalmed in some declasse version of an ancient Garden Vareli ad. And any desire to rescue her from this goongi gudiya state is scotched the moment she opens her mouth. (Though perhaps it is befitting that a heroine whose persona is more about Sonu Dilli’s fantasy than anything else should say such things as “Pata nahi mera dil aisa kyon keh raha hai ki tumhaare dil mein kucch hai jo tum keh nahi pa rahe ho”.)

Hashmi, in comparison, slips into his role with the enviable ease of one who’s done this before. Not even the overcooked dialogue – especially annoying in the voiceovers, where he’s talking to himself – can quite puncture our belief that he really is Sonu Dilli, hotheaded smooth talker extraordinaire, but eventually just a puny pawn in Delhi’s gun binness.

Or perhaps it’s just that he has a slightly more winsome role than poor Randeep Hooda, who’s saddled with playing a cop out to kill the gun binness because, er, a stray bullet killed his wife. Apart from beating up everyone in sight and mouthing as many ‘ch’ gaalis as he possibly can, he scowls and grimaces his way through the film, spending his time getting sodden drunk in the company of his sidekick (Brijendra Kala, with not much to do here) and listening to his dead wife’s voice on an answering machine tape a la Johnny Gaddar. (The filmmakers seem to recognize the implausibility of this life story, because they introduce it by having Kala narrate it to an acquaintance who keeps saying he must be joking.)

There’s nothing wrong with the plot as such, except that it’s thoroughly predictable and therefore thoroughly boring. Sharp execution could have saved the film from its mindnumbing fate – and very occasionally it does, as in a sequence shot deep in the bowels of the Nizamuddin dargah, in the passages that lead to the baoli. But the occasional high octane chase through a network of Sintex-tanki terraces, or the sight of guns being packed in a gleaming handicraft shop is drowned deep in a sea of genericness. Director Kunal Deshmukh seems tragically content to spend his time (and the producers’ money) wandering aimlessly from Qutb Minar to Hauz Khas and back in the vain hope of cashing in on an imagined ‘Delhi film’ tag.

The rest of the cast puts in a desperate effort to keep the ship afloat – Manish Choudhary as gunrunning kingpin Mangal Singh Tomar has a couple of moments, and Mohammad Zeeshan Ayub as Sonu’s best pal Balli is almost memorable – but Jannat 2 cannot be saved from sinking to the bottom.

One only hopes it won’t be rising to the surface as Jannat 3.