Why is Bollywood’s retelling of our stories so high on melodramatic mediocrity?
Ten years ago, a Bollywood superstar paid me handsomely to narrate Ramayan to him. He wanted to create a blockbuster meant to re-ignite India’s civilisational glory. I gave him structure, symbolism, variations, history, the reason the epic is called the Fifth Veda.
At the end, he had one question. How do we make Ram’s entry dramatic? My heart sank. Not because the question was foolish, but because it was sincere. It revealed, in one sentence, everything wrong with an industry that has the money to buy epics but not the patience to understand them.
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Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
