Below the Belt

My Mirror column:

It might not always succeed, but Abhinay Deo’s Blackmail is an ambitious comedy with a pretty dark view of the world we live in.

With Blackmail, director Abhinay Deo returns after a longish interval to the comic territory he made so volubly his own with Delhi Belly (2011). Although it deals with the ‘mature’ topic of marital infidelity rather than a screwed-up diamond heist, Blackmail makes clear that the more puerile of Deo’s preoccupations are alive and well. Shit doesn’t have quite the starring role it did in Delhi Belly, but there are enough potty jokes woven in to make sure we recognise the hand of the auteur. Sometimes literally, as when Deo manages to weave the phrase “the touch of the hand” into a silly scatological subplot. Blackmail’s central protagonist Dev (Irrfan Khan) works in a toilet paper company headed by a ridiculous boss (Omi Vaidya), who is evangelical about trying to wean Indians from water for their ablutions. This also successfully incorporates what seems to be another of Deo’s pet themes: water shortage. (Remember the boys sleeping through their municipal water timings in Delhi Belly?)

Stuck between a dead-end job and a dead marriage, Irrfan’s Dev leads a life of unvarying routine – breakfast consumed to the dull thud of pending EMIs, late nights in the office to the automated ping of video games, and then plodding back home to a solitary dinner left on the table by his disinterested wife Reena (Kirti Kulhari). The one time Dev decides to vary his behaviour, arriving home early with a bunch of roses, he stumbles onto a secret he’d rather not have known. His wife has a lover: Arunoday Singh in what might be his best role ever, as the red trackpant-wearing, clever-but-foolish Ranjit.

As with Delhi Belly, the tone Deo is aiming for is not realistic but blackly surreal. That surreality is most vivid when translated from the subconscious space of the hero’s mind onto the screen. So for instance, as he peers at Reena and Ranjit through a crack in the wall, Dev imagines — for a few satisfying seconds — thrusting the fruit knife into Ranjit’s buff, muscular back. Then the pleasurable fantasy recedes, and instead he gathers up the flowers and his jacket, leaving the house as unnoticed as he had entered. The violent fantasies continue, becoming a recurring comic motif in the film — until they start to come true, and we keep laughing.

The surreality of Blackmail also plays out in Dev’s workplace. Between the horny imaginings of his colleague Anand, Dev’s own antics involving stealing desk photographs of colleagues’ wives, and some insinuations that the boss might have an interest in Dev, the office emerges as a place of suppressed sexual fantasy, without actually showing us any sex.

In the middle-class cinema of the ’70s (Ghar, Chhoti Si Baat, Rajnigandha, even an eventually sad film like Gharonda), the office had a warm, collegial air. Colleagues and bosses in those films often offered a space of faux-kinship to young men and women carving out a new kind of urban life. That innocuous world of gossip and friendly banter has been gradually replaced by a space of corporate alienation and suppressed viciousness, even when there might be an occasional real relationship built there. In this regard, Blackmail follows films as different in tone as Trapped, Pyaar ka Punchnama, Island City and Tu Hai Mera Sunday. Deo makes at least one explicit reference to this sea-change in our cinema — he names a new female employee Prabha (the name of Vidya Sinha’s character in Chhoti Si Baat), activating and then gleefully subverting the old-school expectations of that name.

Blackmail has a perverse, madcap quality that remains rare in Hindi cinema, and it pulls off this lunacy to a great extent. Kirti Kulhari’s Reena could have done with some more interiority, but I thoroughly enjoyed the darkly comic exchanges between the brazen Ranjit and his disbelieving wife Dolly (the marvellous Divya Dutta), starting with her calling him Tommy (“Toh kya seedha kutta hi bol dun?” she says sarcastically when he objects). There are no confidences unbroken here, and no redemption. Any love that might exist remains unrequited, and thus eventually turns into vengefulness.

As he did in Delhi Belly, Deo creates a world bubbling over with politically incorrect laughs, with most emotion buried deep below the surface. But the chain of mutual exploitation is given rather too literal form, for instance in a dustbin marked ‘Use Me’ that becomes a leitmotif. Textual messaging, in fact, is Deo’s directorial weakness, with neon signs, video games and mobile phones alike being frequently used to deliver emotional cues or commentary. If you can ignore this cinematic equivalent of hitting us over the head with a blunt instrument, the poker-faced performances in Blackmail do manage to gesture to a deep core of despair.​

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 15 Apr 2018.

The Heart of the Matter

Today's Mumbai Mirror column:

Rich people do think about money, suggests Dil Dhadakne Do. And sometimes, it seems, they even have feelings.

Through the looking glass: Anil Kapoor and Shefali Shah in a scene from Zoya Akhtar's Dil Dhadakne Do (2015)

For that category of Zoya Akhtar fans who have been waiting for a return to the understated charisma of Luck By Chance, the arrival of Dil Dhadakne Do tells us what we've been refusing to believe: Woh director na milegi dobara. DDD, which plays out almost entirely on an ocean cruise, has much more in common with Akhtar's second offering, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. Other than replacing sun-kissed Spain with Turkey, Akhtar has substituted ZNMD's male friendship with a focus on family bonding. 

The family, needless to say, is fantastically rich. The Mehras -- salt-
and-pepper-haired Kamal (Anil Kapoor) and trying-to-lose-weight Neelam (Shefali Shah), both rather fine -- are celebrating thirty years of marriage by inviting close friends and family on an all-expenses-paid luxury cruise. The fact that it's a marriage both parties have pretty much checked out of doesn't seem to matter much to anyone, least of all the gossipy ladies who seem to hang out with Neelam only so they can make catty remarks behind her back. Even the Mehra progeny -- Ranveer Singh and Priyanka Chopra, both effective in their respective roles as hangdog and tightly-coiled siblings -- seem not to particularly care that the anniversary is just an excuse for their parents to conduct a lavish display of wealth. 

There's nothing wrong with the premise. In fact, Akhtar makes things interesting by telling us that Kamal Mehra's plastic-container-manufacturing firm is making losses. It makes the expensiveness of the cruise a kind of Jalsaghar-style last dance, before the Mehras are forced to publicly acknowledge impending bankruptcy. It also increases the level of fakeness with which we're now dealing. Plus I enjoyed the idea that someone who thinks nothing of inviting three dozen people on a two-week-cruise can simultaneously keep zealous tabs on how much champagne is being drunk.

One of the unexpected things about DDD as a rich-people film is that the rich people in it aren't oblivious to questions of money. Kamal Mehra's self-made businessman (nouveau riche if you're being snooty) is full of resentment at the people living off the wealth he thinks has been produced by his talent and hard work, and the scenes in which this comes to the surface -- with his wife and son respectively -- are some of the film's most brutally honest. I wasn't quite as convinced by the idea of Ayesha's being self-made because she sold her jewellery to start a business: there's a bizarre obliviousness here about khandaani capital as what helps create capitalists. 

But the film's take on these business families is so ridiculously monochromatic that one has the sneaking suspicion that this is the Bombay person's unreconstructed view of the Delhi rich.Whereas in both of Akhtar's previous films, one felt she wasn't harsh enough with her characters, here it seems that she doesn't like them at all. The men's golf-playing camaraderie involves snarkily pulling each other down on business deals, while the lunching wives do the same on personal matters. Ranveer and Priyanka's likeable characters are saddled with familial expectations whose unreasonable burdens Akhtar is clearly sympathetic to, being the inheritor of a weighty family legacy herself. But Akhtar's account of the Delhi elite stops at the lowest level of caricature: uncles who mispronounce English words, and aunties who have nothing better to do than matchmake their daughters, or those of others. And oh God, is it possible that a business scion distressed about selling his private plane would have a mother trying to comfort him with a Nirula's Hot Chocolate Fudge? The whole of the parental generation is shown as so dull, manipulative and narrow-minded that it's not at all clear how their children are managing not to be like them. 

These are the distant, controlling rich parents we've met in many a Hindi film (think of Shenaz Treasurywala's parents in Delhi Belly, or Imran Khan's in Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu), and I applaud Akhtar's desire to scale up them into full-fledged characters. Anil Kapoor is brilliant in comic mode - wait for the moment when he hides behind a tree, or the smug grin with which he sits up from a hospital bed. The tragically under-used Shefali Shah is better in the bitter moments, but even she has some exceptional scenes of black humour: "Acting kyon kar rahe ho?" she says to her suddenly romantic husband, deadpan. "Koi nahi dekh raha."

Such constant transitions from humour to high drama are not easy, and the actors do a fine job, even if the film doesn't always pull it off as a whole. Even Rahul Bose, cruelly miscast as Ayesha's preachy illiberal bore of a husband, manages some decent physical comedy on the tennis court. It's clear that Akhtar is aiming for something that sits between our love of melodrama and a sharply funny undercutting of it. The signature scene that exemplifies this is probably the one where a character threatens to cut her wrist -- with a butter knife. The deliberately dramatised climax, too, is of this ilk.

But when you've spent a whole film showing people as hypocritical control-freaks who're only concerned with what 'society' thinks of them, it's hard to believe in their last-minute changes of heart. No matter what the film's most ridiculous device -- the family dog Pluto, pontificating on human foibles in the voice of Aamir Khan -- tells us, it's hard to believe these unpleasant people have a dil that dhadkos after all. We can but try.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 June 2015. 

Songs in the Streets

My Mumbai Mirror column yesterday:

Kundan Lal Saigal would have turned 111 on 11 April. But here's a question. Why should you care?

When I was a child in Delhi in the early 80s, a family friend I called Vinoo Uncle sometimes sang me to sleep. The song was always "So ja rajkumari". I remember it in the best way a lullaby can be remembered: as a silken cocoon which never failed to rock me softly into slumber. 

It was only decades later that I learnt that it was a song made famous by KL Saigal. Saigal sang it for a film called Zindagi, directed by PC Barua, who made the original 1935 Devdas. (Zindagi, which repeated the Devdas star couple Saigal and Jamuna, was the highest-grossing film of 1940, and I recently learnt that it might be the only film Manto ever reviewed.) 

But Saigal appeared in my life much before I discovered all that. When I was 11, I lived with my nani in Calcutta, and every time I expressed irritation about the music classes I had to take, she would tell me how as a child she had badly wanted to learn to play the violin. And for some reason, the story of her (unfulfilled) musical ambitions was tied to her having been a Saigal fan. I had no idea who Saigal was, except that when Nani told me this story, her eyes would acquire a faraway look as she started to hum some quivery-quavery song of a type which the 11-year-old me could only definitely identify as "old". 

This, while somewhat imprecise, was not untrue. Kundan Lal Saigal was born on 11th April 1904. And if you remember that he was dead before independence, it is absolutely remarkable that so many people continued to sing his songs into the 80s. My nani was perhaps an unsurprising candidate: born in a village in Uttar Pradesh, she would have arrived in Calcutta at the end of the 30s, when Saigal's popularity was at its peak, and she a teenager with adolescent romantic yearnings. Why Vinoo Uncle knew or sang Saigal is less easily explainable: he must have been barely four when Saigal died, in January 1947. But he had a younger sister he may well have sung lullabies to, and they were growing up in Lucknow, the city that produced the song's lyricist, Saiyid Anwar Husain, better known as Arzu Lucknawi. 

But somewhere between the 80s and 2011, I acquired a taste for Saigal. I may not be able to write the paeans to his Bhairavi that biographers of a certain age do, but I was enough of an admirer of "Diya Jalao" and "Ek Bangla Bane Nyaara" to feel slightly conflicted when Ram Sampath composed an parody of his slightly nasal, melancholic, lyric-heavy style, called "Saigal Blues". I must admit that "Is dard ki na hai dawaai, Majnu hai ya tu hai kasaai" fitted perfectly with the irreverent faux-tragedies that filled Delhi Belly, but when I laughed out loud, I wondered if I was betraying Saigal. And my nani. 

This week, as Saigal turned 111, I reopened my copy of Pran Nevile's 2011 biography of him. Like so many Indian biographies of musicians and performers, the book is liberal with anecdotes and scanty with facts - perhaps inevitably so, given how little documentation appears to exist of Saigal's early life. But even these often conflicting origin myths do locate Saigal in the wider context of a North Indian musical milieu, of which little survives today. Nevile conjures up a Jammu in which "famous classical musicians... trained professional singing girls who then looked for patronage from the Maharaja's court", and where a pir could tell a boy to focus on zikr and riyaz for two years. Somehow it seems perfectly fitting that Saigal, having decided to become a singer, should leave home and spend eight years doing all sorts of jobs in the cities of North India - Moradabad, Lahore, Kanpur, Bareilly, Simla and Delhi - while picking up music seemingly from everywhere. The world of Saigal's childhood is a world in which a boy from a well-to-do family still wanted the singing part of Sita in Ramlila. It is a world of "wandering ministrels (sic), temple priests, faqirs and jogis", in which kissa singers sold satirical verses for an anna, and not just religious festivals, but the hawking of goods involved music. 

This was the matrix which early cinema drew on to create a film like Street Singer (1938), and into which its music fed back. In Nevile's words, "paanwallas, tongawallas, peons, clerks, hawkers, students and teachers could be heard humming Saigal's ghazals". And Lahore's famed kothas rang with Urdu ghazals popularised by Saigal. 

Nevile credits Saigal's songs for popularising film music on records. But cinema and recorded music were then far from replacing live performance; something best illustrated by the fact that cinemas in Lahore combined film screenings with live song-and-dance performances: "Ek ticket mein do maze". 

The story of Saigal could be the story of many things: of Indian cinema's first properly mobbed superstar; of the rise of gramophone recording; of Hindi cinema before it became Bombay cinema - when Indian cinema was being produced almost entirely from Calcutta, with several films made in Bengali and remade in Hindi. As the industry shifted base, Saigal, too, moved to Bombay, but died soon after, an alcoholic, at the young age of 42. (There is a strange echo of Manto here, who died soon after leaving Bombay, also an alcoholic in his forties.) Will someone not make the bio-pic?

Published in Mumbai Mirror.

Triumph of Hinglish: How shuddh Hindi lost its groove

The second part of an essay published on Firstpost.

In Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s comedy classic Chupke Chupke (1975) language purist Raghavendra Sharma (Om Prakash) is given a taste of his own medicine in the form of deliberately abstruse shuddh Hindi thrown at him by his Hindi-premi Ilahabadi chauffeur Pyare Mohan (Dharmendra). Of course, in reality, no Hindi speaker ever talks of travelling by lauhpathgamini agnirath (the fiery chariot that travels on an iron path), smoking a dhoomra-shalaaka (smoke-emitting stick), or wearing a kanth-langot (neck-loincloth).

These super-Sanskritic words — said to have been coined by Hindi’s guardians to combat the onslaught of English words like ‘train’, ‘cigarette’ and ‘tie’ — have long been mocked in popular culture. As the late comedian Johnny Walker once famously said of Doordarshan, “They should not announce ‘Ab Hindi mein samachar suniye‘ (Now listen to the news in Hindi); they should say, ‘Ab samachar mein Hindi suniye‘ (Now listen to Hindi in the news)”

Yet in 1975, when the film’s dialogue writer (the wonderful Gulzar) made fun of shuddh Hindi for its distance from the speech of the common man, it was (like Dharmendra’s treatment of his jijaji) a gentle, almost affectionate form of trip-taking. For in the world of Chupke Chupke – the educated North Indian middle class world – speaking shuddh Hindi still had a certain cachet: a sense of national-cultural authority backed by Doordarshan, All India radio and school textbooks.

But by 2011, in the world of Bheja Fry 2, speaking Hindi without interruption marks Bharat Bhushan not as erudite or well-educated, but merely as ridiculous.

How has this come about?


Tyranny of the Hindi purists

It is clear that in post-globalisation India, English is an essential component of upward mobility. It is the only linguistic status-marker that counts. In this deeply screwed-up world, the adoption of English words into spoken Hindi is thus an indisputable way to display status – to establish yourself as not being a Hindi-medium-type.

But Hindi, too, has done its bit to aid the rise of Hinglish.

One of the crucial problems faced by India immediately after Independence was of creating a common language of communication and official discourse. If there was to be a national language, it could not be English, which was perceived as colonial and elitist.

In the shadow of Partition, the Hindiwallas in the Constituent Assembly managed to press their claim for the first official language of the Union to be Hindi, written exclusively in the Devnagari script (rejecting the original recommendation of “Hindustani written… either in Devnagari or the Persian script”). This Hindi was characterised by a Sanskritic uniformity that deliberately rejected the hybridity of the people’s vernacular.

“Pure Sanskrit words are used in the same form everywhere. Therefore only that language can be acceptable all over India which is rich in pure Sanskrit words,” declared the President of the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, KC Chattopadhyaya, in 1949.

As Alok Rai decribes it, the years “between the unconsummated triumph of 1950 and the anticipated climax of 1960, when the enforced cohabitation with English… would come to an end” were spent by Hindiwallas like Dr. Raghuvira in grooming Hindi for its exalted “national” role. In 1960, the Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology was set up, to provide an expanded lexicon that would match that of English.

While the non-Hindi regions’ staunch opposition to Hindi’s hegemonic claims meant that English could not possibly be dropped (it was retained post-1965 as “associate additional official language”), a lot of this new Hindi lexicon gained acceptability via the school system, bureaucratic use and state television: for example, words like ‘prayojak’ for ‘sponsor’.

But this strategy left stranded the poor who did not have a school education and whose spoken language never encompassed the high Sanskritic Hindi of the state. And it had no hope of gaining traction with the educated middle class in the rest of the country, who gained access and familiarity to Hindi mainly through the movies. On the other hand, there was the metropolitan elite – and increasingly, a wider middle class – who had easier access to that other status marker: English.

Official Hindi’s insistence on purity – a positive suppression of the Hindustani word in favour of the Sanskritic equivalent (I remember a succession of school Hindi teachers in ’80s Calcutta and ’90s Delhi insisting on samay instead of waqt, kathin instead of mushkil, deergh instead of lamba, with no explanation) – left the Hindi-speaking public two choices: they could either learn the Sanskritic words, or adopt words from English.

But as Rupert Snell has argued, the more Hindiwallahs coined ever-more-difficult words in higher registers, disdaining Hindustani, the more effectively they drove the Hindi-speaking public towards pre-existing English words, and therefore towards Hinglish.

And it is a vicious cycle: the more the literary custodians of Hindi retreat into an ever-more-shuddh Sanskritic bastion, the more the language of popular culture appears to them too informal, too uncouth.


The age of Delhi Belly

So Hindi today is a beleaguered bastion. The democratisation of the Hindi cultural sphere has been greeted by its upper-caste, upper-class custodians with deep ambivalence.

Is the audience for the mostly-English version supposed to be more comfortable with colourful language – more English abuses, but ironically also more Hindi swearwords – because they’re imagined as the younger and hipper ‘new India’?

On the one hand, they have to acknowledge that the spread and increasing visibility of Hindi owes much to the mass media. As lyricist Prasoon Joshi put it at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2011, “Film aur vigyapan ki duniya ne Hindi ko nayi izzat bakshi” (The world of film and advertising has given Hindi a new respect). Another speaker on the JLF panel ‘Aisi Hindi Kaisi Hindi’ said, “If the language is now on the tongues of those who have never before pronounced a Hindi word, then something very powerful is happening.”

On the other hand, however, there is the recurring lament that this filmi and media Hindi has a severely depleted vocabulary and no longer accords importance either to the literary, or to what Javed Akhtar calls “the softer emotions”. “Tameez kam ho gayi hai, dignity has become outdated,” said Akhtar, talking of the changing Hindi film lyric.

Most Hindi sessions at JLF seemed disproportionately concerned with whether the Hindi of hit songs, films and popular blogs had, in the name of “janta ki bhasha”, opened the floodgates to crudity and vulgarity. “Nowadays it is being said that saala is not even a swearword,” said one speaker sarcastically, referring to Sudhir Mishra’s response to the Censor Board’s objections to naming his film Yeh Saali Zindagi.

The discussion of badtameezi has recently come to a head in the heated debates around the language of the film Delhi Belly. While some are celebrating the film’s unexpurgated dialogues, complete with swearwords, many are either appalled at the Censor Board, or dismiss the film’s colourful language as a juvenile shortcut to cheap laughs.

What’s fascinating, though, is that the original dialogue of the film – described by its producers as 70 percent English, 30 percent Hindi – has been deliberately “toned down” in the “all-Hindi” version. “This was a conscious decision taken to make the Hindi version more acceptable to a wider adult audience,” said Aamir Khan’s spokesperson.

What conclusion can one draw from the producers’ decision? Is the audience for the mostly-English version supposed to be more comfortable with colourful language – more English abuses, but ironically also more Hindi swearwords – because they’re imagined as the younger and hipper ‘new India’? Or are they assumed to be more evolved simply because they’re English-speaking?

Hindi blogger Mihir Pandya has pointed to a crucial moment at which the English dialogue veers from its Hindi version. The original dialogue in the build-up to the ‘Ja Churail’ fantasy song is: “Yeh shadi nahi ho sakti, because this girl has given me a blow job – and being a 21st century man, I have also given her oral pleasure.” The dialogue in the ‘100 percent Hindi’ version is “Yeh shadi nahi ho sakti, kyonki is ladki ne mera choosa hai – aur badle mein maine iski li hai.” So in Hindi, oral sex can be spoken of when performed by a woman, but when a man returns the favour, it is erased to say “I took her”?

In a panel on Imperial English at JLF, writer Mrinal Pande spoke of how Hindi had never given her the freedom to speak of sex that English had. If the gatekeepers of Hindi – even in the world of popular cinema – are able to keep at bay what might be truly radical to shield Hindi’s denizens from the very possibility of transformation, then is it any wonder that they should turn to English?

The first part of this essay is here.

Cinemascope: Delhi Belly; Bbuddah Hoga Terra Baap

My Sunday Guardian column for 3rd July.

Taut, unafraid, witty  — and gets mood right

DELHI BELLY

Director: Abhinay Deo
Starring: Imran Khan, Vir Das, Kunal Roy Kapoor, Poorna Jagannathan


****

This is the most unapologetic film to have come out of the Bombay film industry in a long time. It's unapologetic about being about – and before they decided to release an all-Hindi version, also for – that tiny section of India's population that speaks, lives and breathes almost entirely in English. It's unapologetic, famously, about its colourful language, and various politically incorrect moments. It's even unapologetic about its potty humour, practically making the rude rumbling noises emanating from Kunal Roy Kapoor's stomach into a leitmotif.

But being unapologetic would be no good if it weren't also well-thought-out. Thankfully, it is. Delhi Belly is that rare cool film in which sly one-liners do not replace a plot. LA-based Akshat Varma's story isn't spectacularly new or anything – three young men get caught up in a sticky situation when they find themselves in possession of some smuggled diamonds – but the execution is both taut and atmospheric. There are caricaturish in-laws, burqa-clad getaways and madcap imaginary songs, but director Abhinay Deo manages to keep things on a tight leash; letting the lunacy wash over us, but never too much.

This is a film that's not trying to be 'realistic' so much as surreal. On the most basic level, other than a long Old Delhi sequence, there is very little attempt to map real Delhi neighbourhoods, unlike, say, the superb Do Dooni Chaar or Band Baaja Baraat. The about-to-fall-down flat where the boys live is way too colourfully skanky to seem like a real place that three young reasonably employed Delhi youngsters (a journalist, a photographer, an advertising guy) would rent; the brothel, the advertising office, even the party to which Menaka (a striking Poorna Jagannathan) calls Tashi (Imran Khan) have nothing specifically Delhi about them, and so on. But none of this seems to really matter, because the film somehow gets the mood exactly right, aided by Ram Sampat's fantastic soundtrack, Amitabh Bhattacharya's very clever lyrics, minor characters like the smarmy jeweller, Menaka's insanely belligerent ex-husband, and the ubercool Menaka herself, who are all perfectly Delhi – not to mention the brilliantly memorable Vijay Raaz as the guy who wants his diamonds back.


Big B shows he ain't quite Bbuddah yet

BBUDDAH HOGA TERRA BAAP
Director: Puri Jagannath
Starring: Amitabh Bachchan, Raveena Tandon, Hema Malini, Sonu Sood

***

Right from the opening sequence, which gives us an updated version of the truly villainous '80s villain – the brilliant Prakash Raj asking a sidekick if he likes watching live cricket, and then announcing that he's now going see a "live bomb" explode on television – Puri Jagannath makes it clear that we're watching a true-blue, larger-than-life masala picture. And who can do larger-than-life better than Amitabh Bachchan? Clad in suitably jhataak outfits – all-white suit with yellow scarf, or motorcycle jacket and aviators – the great man gives us a great deal to smile about as the rakish Vijju, a retired gangster who's back in Mumbai on a mission. Whether he's ribbing the 43-year-old "bachcha" at the airport who has the gall to ask why he's breaking the queue, impressing the hell out of present-day gangsters with his sharpshooting skills, or advising the harassers of young women in coffee shops to learn how to woo women, Bachchan seems like he's thoroughly enjoying himself. Which ensures that we are, too.

Other ingredients provided for our viewing pleasure include the wonderful Sonu Sood, perfectly cast as the angry young ACP Karan Malhotra, and his love interest Tanya, the pretty enough but rather wooden Sonal Chauhan. Jagannath also gives us an ex-wife in the form of a weepy Hema Malini (I must confess I was glad there was as little of her as possible, apart from the superb final dialogue), and an ex-flame called Kamini, in the form of the still super-curvacious Raveena Tandon, who unfortunately goes from attractively ditzy to over-the-top annoying in minutes. My pick of the non-Bachchan moments goes to Amrita (Charme Kaur), who wails long and loud in the most endearingly convincing fashion. But really, we know what we're really here for, and there's plenty of that: Amitabh unexpurgated, and with only one song that recycles his old hits into an embarrassing white-girl-filled medley. For all those Bachchan fans who've been increasingly distraught as he goes from one ridiculously mannered performance to another (I mean all the Blacks and Last Lears out there), interrupted only by the insufferable grandfatherly-ness of KBC, Bbuddah is a joy.