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Honsla Eendhan Badla.
Tag: movies
SS Rajamouli’s Varanasi – The next phase of the Indian wave?
One of the interesting things about the Asian countries as they got rich was that they followed a pattern.
0.65-0.75 HDI – Building public infrastructure (metros/bullet trains etc), systems.
0.75-0.85 HDI – Companies becoming global players. Japanese companies in the 80s. Korean in the late 90s-early 2000s. Chinese from the mid 2010s onward.
0.85 HDI+ – Pop culture becomes mainstream. Soft power. Anime/video games in the 90s for Japan. Hallyu in the 2000s for Korea. Chinese video games and C-dramas are also picking up pace now internationally (Will be a deluge by the early 2030s).
India is currently in the first phase (alongside Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines etc).
China is in the second (alongside Malaysia, Thailand).
Japan, South Korea in the third (alongside Taiwan, Hong Kong etc).
Judging by current timelines India enters phase 2 around 2030 and phase 3 around 2050.
But it doesn’t have to be exact and some green shoots can happen before.
Rajamouli’s RRR was very well received globally (Japan as well as the west) and audiences loved the over the top earnest action in a time of crossover saturated mainstream Hollywood movies. It even won an Oscar.
His next project is the one of the most expensive Indian films ever and is getting a lot of traction from international media as well as movie tech companies(Dolby, IMAX).
Here is the official IMAX channel launching the trailer.
Interview with Collider.
The movie seems to have a very interesting premise with a Indiana Jones style globe trotting adventure with time travel shenanigans. I assume judging from the trailer the adventure will take them through the Ramayana as well.
Can be a game changer for Indian cinema and what takes India to the next level. India is already the third biggest box office in the world (behind USA+Canada and China) and the only one who will be capable beside these two to make big budget VFX-heavy epics.
A lot of VFX work is already done in India so this will hold India in good stead in the future (DNEG which does VFX for lots of Hollywood movies like Dune etc is an Indian owned company and is handling the Ramayana movie as well which is another movie getting a big international push).
Pakistan, India – culture, music, movies
The last few days have really been dominated by a cacophony of ….tu, tu, mai, mai in the BP comment threads with competitive “patriotism” flying thick and fast. Amidst all the noise generated by …certain hostility focused agendas, its easy to lose sight of the fact that for all the problems and challenges faced by the 2 nation-states, the people that inhabit the subcontinent, still continue to have a bunch of things in common.
So allow me this …palette cleanser of a post. The ICC T20 Cricket World Cup is in progress, and the teams of both India and Pakistan have managed to qualify for the “Super 8” stage. Usman Tariq, is a rising star who has recently joined the Pakistani team, as a bowler who serves up ‘mystery spin’ from a unique bowling action, enabled slightly in part due to an anatomically exceptional elbow which has elicited some allegations of chucking (throwing). He has undergone test and has been cleared of this allegations already.
What I found notable about Usman, apart from his repertoire of unique googlies and arm angles, is him sharing the fact that watching an Indian movie inspired him to pursue his dream – a career in cricket. M.S. Dhoni a former India captain, had a biopic made about him a few years ago, which was a massive hit in India and beyond. Usman, as we know, is hardly an exception when it comes to Pakistanis consuming Indian content including movies. Pakistanis, in some ways, are arguably even more ardent consumers and fans of ‘Bollywood’ than Indians. As an Indian listener to Pakistani podcasts, you can’t help but notice how movie and song quotes from Indian films and pop culture, are seamlessly used by Pakistanis as metaphors to describe situations. Even more so than is common for Indians to do so.
On the flip side, Indians are enthusiastic consumers of Pakistani music – the popularity and opinions on the ‘quality’ of Pakistani Coke Studio abound, so does a sizeable number of fans for Pakistani soap operas.
The point is, as much as the interactions of India and Pakistan is dominated by the disproportionate shadow cast by the history of conflict between the two states, and especially the untenable history of PakMil sponsored multi-decade history of terrorism and “non-state actor” violence, we still see a common culture interwoven through the day-to-day existence of the …awaam