Black Friday

I am looking forward to watching 2 Hindi movies, the DVDs of which I have acquired recently. One is the movie called “Yahaan” based on issues in Kashmir, and the other is “Dansh” which is set in the backdrop of the north-eastern rebellion. The common underlying theme of both these movies is the fact that they deal with real issues which are contemporary in a sense. When it comes to Hindi movies, though I can watch any form of it and enjoy it too… be it a senseless comedy or a Hollywood-inspired thriller or a timepass ‘masala’ flick, there is nothing which gives me a bigger kick than off-beat ‘real’ cinema which brings to the fore factual events and their repercussions.

This is the reason why, when I aimlessly wondered ‘which was the best movie that I have seen this year’, only one name came to my mind - Black Friday. I guess many would not even have heard the name of this movie, since it has not yet seen the light of the day. Most people would not even know that this movie is a real-life peek into the plotting of the Mumbai Blasts in 1993 and the police investigations thereafter. It is the only movie which gives a blow-by-blow account of why and how the blasts took place and how the Mumbai police unearthed the entire plot.

All the movie does is portray the bare truth, in its most naked and pure form, not mincing any words, not adding any dramatization, not falling prey to any exaggeration, and not fearing any aftermath. It portrays every character with total honesty and candour, and does not even try to assign aliases to the actual names. So, in the movie Tiger Memon is called Tiger Memon and not “Panther” etc like most Hindi movies are prone to do. And Dawood Ibrahim is called Dawood Ibrahim and not some ‘Javedbhai’ or ‘Malikbhai’ like he would have been called in an average Hindi movie. This is just one of the many reasons which make Black Friday special. And, this precisely, is one of the main reasons for the film not having released yet, in spite of all its honesty and portrayal of truth.

This was supposed to be director Anurag Kashyap’s first movie. However, the talented director, who also wrote Satya and scripted Shool, has been labeled a ‘jinx’ since then, because his previous venture Paanch, also got stuck (with the censors for excessive violence) and subsequently Alvin Kaalicharan got stalled due to Anil Kapoor’s late withdrawal. I am already a huge fan of Kashyap, and hope that his bad days are numbered so that we get to see more of his films soon, including the under production ‘Gulal’

I had first heard about Black Friday when Indian Ocean came to our campus during our cul-fest ‘Unmaad’ and played the brilliant composition ‘Bandein’ from the movie’s soundtrack. The next thing I heard was that the release of the movie had been stayed by the High Court in response to an appeal by 36 under-trials of the case who had feared that the movie could prejudice the outcome of the case, which is underway in the TADA court. In around February, one of my best friends told me that he had seen this movie in a film festival in Pune, and praised it no ends. In Sydney, the movie is freely available at all Indian DVD stores, and it was in May that I had borrowed it from a colleague and watched it.

The movie is based on journalist S. Hussain Zaidi’s book, which accounts for the bomb-blast trials and investigations straight from the police record. The irony of the matter is the fact that the book has long been released uninterrupted and without any issue. However, when it came to the faster and far-reaching medium, the parties and the courts both reacted swiftly and did, what in my opinion, is a suppression of the constitutional right of freedom of speech. A movie narrated out of a book already in market, and which has facts straight out of the police records has no strong reason not to be released… and the reason given here is to supposedly protect the accused and charge-sheeted people who are responsible for causing a tragedy of massive proportions and who are supposed to be terrorists with established linkages to the ISI.

I realize that I belong to the lucky few who have had the privilege of watching this superb and passionate piece of cinema, and anyone who has seen it would agree that the film deserves to be shown to the larger audiences, and the government, instead of putting a restraint order on it should rather be making it tax-free so that the world can know about the plight that thousands of our countrymen were subject to in this incident, and the efficiency of the Mumbai police and the CBI in unearthing the plot. Some of the sequences in the movie are a revelation with respect to the working of the police and their hands-on approach and dedication.

The movie starts predictably in a police custody cell on 9^th March 1993, when a bashed up Gul Mohammed spills the beans about the conspiracy to bomb major locations in Mumbai. However, the police make a mockery of his statements only to find their feet in their mouths 3 days later when it turns out to be true. What follows is a minute by minute account of the blasts, the supposed rationale behind them (which was to save the face of Islam in India) and the entire modus operandi which was carried out with near precision with 12 blasts occurring serially. Then follows a detailed version of the police investigation and the breakthroughs made by them.

Kay Kay Menon is quite impressive as Rakesh Maria, the officer who was behind the whole operation, and Aditya Srivastava as Badshah Khan has done a good job as well. These 2 actors are steadily becoming the stalwarts of parallel cinema, like Om Puri and Naseeruddin Shah used to be in the old days. Anyways, here is hoping that Black Friday sees the end of the day, and that Anurag Kashyap gets what he deserves… which is, acclaim and applause from much more than just a handful of film-festival audiences.

Will sign off with the movie’s opening line, a quote by Mahatma Gandhi:
“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”

Update : On a different note, a request to all readers to please visit this, and do whatever they can for the Earthquake Victims.