Bollywood and mediocrity

Well, as with economic growth where we overlooked manufacturing for services and agriculture, and are paying a relatively higher price, things seem to be going the same way for our very own Bollywood. Marketing tactics, Complex financial instruments to insure the movies, new age corporatization and vertical integration of the movie making process and state of the art production techniques are all the good things to have happened to the film making lately.
But Bollywood seem to have overlooked one very critical thing in going a la Henry Ford way of churning pot boilers every financial quarter. And that is QUALITY! Yes, with the frenzied mass production of the movies and seemingly mindless comedies and multi starrer non sense dramas, I wonder where exactly is the industry headed to. Take recent example of Race, an overhyped thriller with songs and trailers set to capture the mind space of the consumer (I dare say not audience, as we have been turned into mass consumer per se). On seeing the actual product (rather a commodity I dare say!) I was disappointed to the core, to say the least. I was expecting a decent slick action flick from a progressive looking Bollywood, but witnessed a dud performance and storyline very shamelessly trying to sell its audience a host of dance numbers and scintillating music videos. Well, if the real purpose of such type of movies is to present a CHITRAHAAR, enveloped in some kind of movie scenes, that’s another thing.
I want to ask the producers and the directors of this kind of mindless in your face kind of cheap comedy, mind numbing music videos and very very pathetic acting, that do they really take us audience for granted or what. Or don’t these film makers trust the intelligence of the common Indian audience and think that the majority is still living below the common minimum level of aesthetic and artistic taste and cant appreciate some really good piece of story and acting?
I agree with most of the defenders of the Indian cinema who point their fingers at the mind numbing low quality movies being churned by the Hollywood itself. But they more than make it up with some exceedingly well directed scripted and acted movies.
After all, movies have been the face of the society since the turn of the twentieth century. Raj Kapoor and Akiro Kurosawas of the age are still remembered and cherished for the quality they had produced. Not to talk of the art movies, Alfred Hitchcock, Oliver Stone, Francis Ford Coppolla, Robert Zemeckis, Clint Eastwood, Roman Polanski, Martin Scorcese and Steven Spielberg are among the many commercially successful directors who have been able to capture the breath of audience by the sheer merit of fine art of film making. And don’t tell me that Indian film makers are not capable of such masterpieces as their western counterparts have produced. Satyajit ray and Shyam Benegal have been among the luminaries of the Indian film making.
As one of my Marketing professors very famously used to say, “Indian movies are going the same way that Indian higher education is headed for, in coming decade. With falling levels of the higher education, people will sooner or later start looking for better alternatives as their per capita income grows (I guess that has already started to happen, which many of us very jingoistically claim to be brain drain). And as foreign institutions of higher education sense the potential here (they already have!), they will set up their shops here. It will soon happen. Indian Movies will follow suit with our higher education, with dubbed Hollywood High quality Drama, romance and comedy flicks finding way to the Indian audience’s mind space. (Action already had!)”
Hmm…I think I can extend my Professor’s argument a bit further. As with some of our Institutes of higher learning doing a good work (Count IITs, some NITs, IIMs and other good B schools), all is not lost with our Bollywood too, thanks to a handful of thoughtful filmmakers like Ashutosh Gowarikar, Shekhar Kapoor, Nagesh Kuknoor, Mira Nair among others, along with a couple of highly talented and visionary actor, who really make the audience sit up and think.