One of my biggest weaknesses has been my incapacity as a "social" person, a "people" person, an "empathetic" person. I have been dubbed as "emotionless" or rather as an "unemotional" person. If I were to analyze the reasons behind it, a lack of exposure to good movies and books would be couple of them. I haven't been good at either. While I regret missing out on both these in my early life, I think the opportunity cost of not seeing movies might have been slightly lesser of the two. There are a few reasons for that, one being that I can still try and fill up my backlog, because unlike books, watching films consumes a fixed quantum of time no matter who sees it. Books on the other hand requires you to spend much effort and time, especially when picking it up as a hobby in later life.The other reason for lesser opportunity cost of not watching films is also the extremely poor quality of movies in the late 80's and most of 90's. That was the decade of decay of Indian cinema. If I were to analyze and measure the cinematic excellence in India, I am sure, cinema of this period would stand out as the worst on all parameters of creativity and entertainment value. It was as insipid as a wrinkled cucumber on a cold frosty winter day. While I am no expert on films, I do have a modest sense of art. The boy meets girl, running around trees, rich girl poor boy movies showcased the lack of rigor,imagination and freshness in an industry which thrives on novelty of storytelling if not novelty of stories themselves. I concede that there could have been a big underworld influence, however that is no reason for such a poor show. I remember having a discussion with my friend in my 2nd year hostel room. Overlooking the famed peepal tree which had our holi shorts still dangling from its branches, I asked myself "Why is Govinda such a huge star?". Hero No. 1 or some such Xth generation "No 1" movie had just been released few days before and had been dubbed as a huge success. In my opinion Govinda is one of the sloppiest actors in Hindi cinema and his movies certainly devoid of any sense. I was complaining that he should be dumped by the audience for producing such movies. What I did feel at that time however, was that there was a huge audience who wanted to see his movies. Surely, such movies were being made because there was a demand for it. If Altaf Raja could sell 65Million copies of "Tum to thahere pardesi", success of Govinda or Rajnikanth should have been no surprise to me. It is here that my current reading of marketing and strategy concepts comes in handy. To me this is something akin to Ford's assertion of "Any car as long as it is Black in color". I was reading a book by Rama Bijapurkar titled "We are like that only". I see a lot of similarities in the two. In many ways than one, we were in an era where people did not have any choice. They consumed whatever was being dished out to them. With liberalization things changed dramatically. Consumers started rejecting old wine in new bottle. There was a wave of new cinema from RGV and many a nouveau chef d'orchestre who challenged and destroyed the decaying movie making "template". Consumers started lapping up their offerings instantly. They wanted value for their money. If you are still wondering, what the heck is my point, all I am trying to drive home is that, in my pursuit of to reduce my cinematic timeshare deficit I watched 4 movies this week, each of them wonderfully well crafted and meaningful. The movies I watched were
1) "Barbarians at the gate" based on the LBO takeover saga of RJR Nabisco.
2) "Black Friday"- For me one the best Indian docudramas ever made..... period.
3) "Reservoir Dogs" - Quentin Tarantino... need I say anymore
4) "3 Idiots" - Another masterpiece from Hirani and superlative performance by Aamir Khan.
Lastly, I also increased my intellectual "book value" by reading half of "We are like that only". The book gives some insights into changing tastes of Indian consumers. The success of good quality movies and rejection of the old formula is an endorsement of the point made in the book about Indian consumers. I can cite numerous bollywood movies in the last 4-5 years that I have thoroughly enjoyed watching. Movies like "Munnabhai MBBS", "DevD","Sarkar", "Swades", "Lagaan", "Black" etc to name a few have been outstanding.
Those were the last 4 days of my life for you. A chirstmas holiday well spent on the good things in life : sleep, movies and books.
Nice one...
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