Playing to the Gallery

Playing to the gallery isn’t the prerogative of the players anymore. Play-acting is an art today and expect the same from people you least expect. So it wasn’t surprise that besieged me last week-end… but a sense of sacrilege! In a ‘world-tour’(which simply means those nascent territories where Bollywood producers expect to invade)- where actors are expected to do pretty much everything on-stage for the Bollywood-starved NRIs- I saw an aging Mr. Bachhan act out some of the memorable dialogues from his rich repertoire of films. The zenith of his performance came when he embarked on the famous scene from ‘Deewar’. The angry-young man with the sheer force of his maternal love had induced the gods to play doctor and save his mother some thirty odd years ago. The same man mouthed the same lines with the same amount of passion on the ‘world-tour’ stage, only replacing the gods by the equally powerful (at least on Fridays) audience. As expected the audience was in tears not so much with the performance than with an associative memory.

The dialogues of the distraught ‘son’ were similar to the real life Mr.Bachhan who had lost his mother recently. So was the Big B personalizing the celluloid tragedy for cheap emotional titillation? Or was it merely a coincidence? We love to humanize our stars, our gods and associate them with the same emotions that affect us. Mr. Big B fitted the bill perfectly. ‘HE too cries for his mother’- that’s what the organizers want…that’s what we earnestly hope we can feel.


Author : Pranab Ganguly
Date: 19.10.2008
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