Surgeons and gossips are the only ones who can raise eyebrows in the Hindi film industry. The severest charge of plagiarism cannot.
Take the song 'Character dheela hai' from the Salman Khan-starrer 'Ready'. It’s “inspired”—as Hindi film industrywallahs would euphemistically put it—from 'Brother Louie' by the German group 'Modern Talking'. When I called up 'Ready’s director Anees Bazmee to ask if the producers had bought the rights to revisit 'Brother Louie', he replied: “I don’t know anything. You will have to ask (music director) Pritam.”
But isn’t it the production house’s job to buy rights?
“I’m not aware, Ma’am. Pritam just played the song for us and we loved it.”
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that one of the most commercially successful directors in the country seems quite unruffled by what would be considered a serious allegation elsewhere. This is, after all, an industry that is capable of doing a scene for scene, situation for situation lift of the Hollywood classic 'Mississippi Burning', presenting it to us as the Ajay Devgn-starrer 'Aakrosh'; where 'Phone Booth' with Colin Farrell gets translated into Hindi and becomes the Sanjay Dutt-Irrfan-Kangna Ranaut-starrer 'Knockout'.
In an industry where morals seem to be even weaker than the copyright laws that facilitate such theft in our country, stars deny all charges in pre-release interviews. Once the press and public have seen the film, these same stars make themselves scarce.
But there’s more to this pilferage than lax laws, a drought of ideas among Hindi filmmakers and their desire to save the money that is required for rights purchases.
The truth is, even when they spend that cash and take the legally correct path, Bollywood isn’t polite enough to acknowledge its inspirations. And most fans are disappointingly willing to ignore such behaviour if the film in question is sufficiently entertaining or stars actors they’re devoted to. So, two years after '3 Idiots' became a blockbuster, Hindi film acolytes are still arguing about whether '3 Idiots' was 30% similar to Chetan Bhagat’s book Five Point Someone, or 100% or 32.295% or 19.343. Producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra was legally on solid ground with the space he gave the book in the film’s credits. But the refrain from the team of '3 Idiots' that their film is only “loosely based” on Bhagat’s book showed a lack of courtesy towards their source material.
It’s the same lack of courtesy that allowed Shirish Kunder to claim a story credit for the Akshay-Katrina-starrer 'Tees Maar Khan' despite a last-minute acquisition of remake rights to the 1960s Vittorio de Sica film 'After the Fox'. Oh Bollywood, for every single step forward why do you take two steps back?!
(The writer is on Twitter as @annavetticad )