Oscars are the biggest deal. And the movies that get there are pretty darn good; diving in deep into the woods, springing morals and questions where they’re usually not found, and planting answers where there aren’t really any questions being provoked. There’s ever so much to be known and learnt and taken from these movies that don’t encourage popcorn-flavor dispute. Sometimes there are no morals or lessons projected; sometimes there’s just a story, and at the end of the show it makes you feel intense emotions simply because the character or the plot riveted you so deep.
And after all the tears and morals and gestures, you see their gorgeously styled Hollywood entourage in beautiful Armani strutting across red carpets and smiling and waving at cameras, flushing and gushing and stopping to take breaths while discussing their roles and movie-background information to keep the press and you, lovely reader and viewer, happy and satisfied, surrounded by gleaming and glowing and glittering lights of Los Angeles.
And far off away from the Oscars is a place, less lit up, less glamorous, less intensely screamed and rooted for, but equally heinously talented of sorts. There’s not an inch of air in this country not smeared with the immense talent of film-making. There may be plenty of The Great Gatsby to go around, with extra footage to boot, but if you haven’t watched Panther Panchali yet, you should probably rent it right now.
Satyajit Ray was so skilled, he wrote, directed – why, he even drew scenes, for his movies. He could do anything that asked for imagination. And boy, did he do a monumentally amazing job of it. He was a director, fiction writer, publisher, illustrator, calligrapher, graphic designer and film critic. Rituparno Ghosh was another masterpiece of ideas. He shot straight into the female psyche, poking and pinching till his films were made completely beautiful from his ideas.
Mira Nair and Anurag Kashyap still continue to push forward film-making into depths of blinding talent. Lagaan, Gandhi, Rang De Basanti are films not too rich on imagination, but tell a story that spikes deep enough into you to remain there long after you’ve gone back home. Yes, imagination is not always a pre-requisite for good cinema; sometimes you make do with something that you and everybody else already knows, and spin it in a way that leaves you and everybody else wonder deeply about the things already discovered within one’s soul. Now that is a talent not even imagination can fathom.
And then there are names unheard of, their movies, even less so, but equally, if not more, gifted. Indian talent is latent; waiting to attain promiscuity on the celluloid film. There’s obscene talent hidden in various regions in our country, like the veils behind which Indian women hide their beautiful faces. Sometimes you catch a glance, and then it’s gone. It will be long till you catch the next one. It’s always there, though, hidden and fleeting.
Watch the Oscars, watch the good old Indian DVD rents. They are both unique and beautiful in their own ways, with their own trajectories, thoughts, situations, psyches, personalities and emotions. Indian cinema has so much bold and penetrating talent to offer that maybe there’s a reason why they are kept so quiet – because they are so deeply deafening.
