Mohenjodaro, Mujhe Dil Se Utaaro

Robo ko coco mat kaho……..

My first Rajnikant movie. Till date I had only known Rajni as the guy who believed in splitting bullets into multiple fractions. He was in stark contrast with my school maths teacher’s hero, Amitabh Bacchan. We were told, “Multiplying two matrices is like an Amitabh Bacchan fight sequence. There may be a lot of bad guys around him at a given point of time, but he finishes them one by one.” Surely Rajnikant’s idea of kicking one bad guy who like billiard balls floors five other bad guys- would have thrown his golden rule of matrix multiplication in utter doldrums. So Rajnikant lived in my imagination as the guy who visualized Physics the way perhaps Stephen Hawking did- except that the latter had a thing for mathematical proofs. Infact I had never really got down to see any south-indian movie as a matter of fact. I lived with the generally accepted notions that the hero would be overweight, the heroine uncomfortable in the bosom department and all the villains were amateur rapists. The heroine’s arm was up for grabs in every alternate scene.

Robot, Rajnikant’s latest ‘blockbuster’ cost me two hundred and fifty rupees to sit in a packed multiplex. We had reached around fifteen minutes late; and as I slid into the PVR seat, Rajni had already taken centre stage. It was exactly as I had thought. Huge tuft of hair that suggested lack of moisturizing shampooing. Three piece suit. Alternately casuals in a shocking cocktail of colours. And a guy who looked distinctly out of depths in any scene where he had to say non-confrontational dialogues.

Within the first thirty minutes, Aishwarya Rai breaks into the first of the innumerable dance sequences that her contract with the producers must have specified. Rajnikant is now sitting on a hammock in a desert (wearing a red outfit I think), walking on the sand and strumming a guitar while Aishwarya does a worm-like wriggle on repeat mode. Fifteen minutes late, and it seemed we had missed nothing. Hell, I think I could now visit the loo that I had ignored in the rush to get to the film. This was a really nice, accommodating film indeed. No pressure to be on time. Didn’t require you to stare mystically at a spinning top wondering what level of inception the movie was talking of. Simple dance-incident-fight-dance-incident-fight-dance sequence.

Which is why there didn’t happen to be too many dialogues. Verbal communication had been kept to its parsimonious minimum- just enough to jerk the plot ahead or justify a dance or fight in the next scene. No fancy poetry, no emotional brouhaha. Coherent one line instruction-like dialogues. “Oh no, iske andar khatarnaak red chip lagaya gaya hai.’ ‘The internal electromagnetic field attacks the neutrons which diffuse the gamma rays. SO THIS ROBOT IS SAFE.” Or “Maine tumko banaya hai. Mita bhi sakta hun kabhi bhi.”
See; really simple. No unnecessary drama before the sentence. Only bullet-like delivery.

Oh, and I almost forgot; the android. The beauty of the scheme is that in the guise of a robot, all the actions of Rajnikant seem justifiable under the tenants of technology. He can twist his head by 360 degrees, break buildings, fire bullets from his fingers, negotiate with mosquitos…….you get the picture don’t you! There is an evil avatar of the robot; and it seems like the discerning audience in the south want villains who have a touch of Ravana in them. So every now and then after the intermission; ‘He He Haw Haw’ is roared out whenever the villainous robot is planning on his next move.

And yes, bad guys are all…….molesters. Aishwarya Rai in a tight kurta seems to be the ultimate pornographic crescendo for the sinister villains. Most of them have a fetish for swords, daggers, chains, sickles- basically any thing that gleams in light and has potential for a very gory confrontation. Evidently the idea of leaving a forensic trail is lost upon these merciless mercenaries. There must be atleast three scenes where Aishwarya is wriggling herself out of a potential rape scenario with all of them crowding her. And yes, even in this movie; Rajnikant refers to all of them with his priceless- ‘Rascalas’.

Ah, and finally humour. There is a wide spectrum ranging from pulling the bad guys’ pants down to beating up a sidekick with a shoe. But the real comedy was in those dance sequences. I never thought I would ever be atop a hill with dancers all in a horizontal line vigorously gyrating with the hero in front of them, and the heroine at a distance blushing and worm-wriggling. The last time I saw something close must have been some defunct Hindi movies in the nineties where a Juhi Chawla or Raveena Tandon would dance with the dancers led by a Saif Ali Khan (the pre-Dil Chahata Hai version that outperformed himself out of the market), or Ajay Devgan (the silly-smile version, please). But here I was on a Rs 250 seat wondering what plot could possibly generate a dance every fifteen minutes.

But it’s the last twenty minutes that really tests the limits of your imagination. The special effects chase scene would keep Godzilla at bay and match any other monster-rampage scene in English movies. Twenty minutes; and we are left battling a huge serpent, giant ball, cylindrical barrel and a huge giant- all assembled of mini human robots. As robotic as you can get!
Two fifty rupees; entirely vasooled. No film had ever made me feel that way. This was a film where Rajni tells you, “Listen, I know that is very hard-earned money. So I am going to make every rupee work hard for you. I am going to sing, dance, fight, laugh, decapitate monsters, seduce girls, collide trucks and smash villains to pulp…so that you feel that you have got your money’s worth. No wonder they have huge posters of Rajnikant back in the south. It’s a value proposition!

Will I go to see another Rajnikant movie again? Currently I think I have already overstuffed myself in the buffet. I also had Dabang before this, and though that seemed like a school play in front of Robot; that had a sound dosage of incredibility to it. Anjaana Anjaani was plain unpalatable though the initial garnishing looked good. But enough of these heavy lunches. Give me some light, continental Aparna Sen for a change. Perhaps some tossed Chinese Aamir noodles? Or how about some art film salad? 'What do you suggest...what's today's special?' I ask, shutting the menu card.