Call Me Don

Movie: Don 2

Directer: Farhan Akhtar

Cast: Shah Rukh Khan, Priyanka Chopra, Boman Irani, 

Lara Dutta, Om Puri, Kunal Kapoor

Don 2 is SRK’s style statement. The way Dhoom 2 was overshadowed by Hrithik Roshan, so is the case with Don2.  Those of you who watched Don 1 and liked it will like Don 2, those who did not like Don1 will surely like Don 2.

The movie begins with a narration in SRK’s voice, he gives you a recap of the movie Don 1 and what has happened in Don’s life thereafter thereby setting the stage for Don 2.

The plot goes somewhat like this, the Don having conquered the Asian drug market is now planning to take over the European market, and this has ruffled too many feathers. Various mafia gangs have started combining their efforts in a bid to eliminate Don forever, and the trap is laid.

It’s time for Don to make an entry and he makes the grand entrance in the Bollywood style driving his motorboat through a picturesque lagoon of  Thailand. Little did the Don knew that people are vying for his blood, but even if he knew it would have hardly made any difference to him. What follows is an action sequence where the Don slaughters the attackers with such agility that even the Superman would have fumbled, welcome to bollywood here the hero has a larger than life persona and highly developed senses which he uses to his advantage.

Now it’s Roma (Priyanka Chopra) turn to make an entry, she is working with the Interpol and her aim in her life is to put Don behind the bars. And then there is Om Puri her mentor who decides to ‘retire hurt’, he has only one regret that in his career spanning over 33 years if there was one criminal whom he could not put behind the bars was Don. With heavy heart he hands over this responsibility to Roma.

But Don being the magnanimous one comes and surrenders just a few minutes after this conversation as if he knew what was going on in Om Puri’s life. While Roma arrests her no one tries to find out what made Don surrender.

Now begins the actual plot of Don 2, Don surrendered so that he could break out of prison along with Vardan (Boman Irani, his enemy). Vardhan agrees to come along, rest of the movie revolves around how Don plots and executes the plan of stealing currency printing plates from one of the central banks.

Performance wise SRK is at his best, Priyanka gets very little space to show her work, Lara was convincing in the limited space, Boman Irani and Kunal Kapoor did a fine job of supporting cast, it was Om Puri who was wasted, that role could have been done by anyone.

There are few loopholes but again considering it’s a Hindi-masala movie those can be overlooked and coming to the songs the lesser said the better. Treatment of the story is good (there are enough of twists and turns), editing is crisp, dialogues are catchy, beautiful cinematography, and some reasonably good action sequences make it worth watching.

My favourite dialogue: Don tells Kunal Kapoor, “Don’t call me sir, bahut sareef sunai deta hai, call me Don.”

 

Life Is Stranger Than Fiction

It is said don’t judge a book by its cover, but there are certain books which live upto their cover page…The cover page of  Nine lives I bought in 2011 had eyes of a Kannur dancer wearing a red head gear with silver serpent heads on it, a very intriguing picture exuding immense energy.

That's the cover of my copy

The look said it would not let me keep the book down without finishing it, it would stare back at me to remind every single day that the nine chapters based on nine characters needs my attention.

What is fascinating about these characters is that they are not fictional, they are real people just like us, but as I navigated through the chapters the line delineating facts and fiction blur, every chapter left me with a collage of images which look stranger than fiction.

I could not continue reading two chapters back to back...I would leave the book for a day before I began a new chapter every time. It felt as if I would be denying every character its due if I moved on to the next immediately.

William Dalrymple talks about nine different characters following different paths but there is a common thread running through each of these characters, all these characters have immense faith in life irrespective of the path they have chosen for themselves. And somewhere on the way all of them have found their share of happiness.

The author takes the reader through the travails of a Jain nun, a Kannur dancer, a Devadasi, a Rajasthani epic singer, a Sufi, a Buddhist monk, an Idol  maker of Tanjore, a Tantric practitioner, and a Baul singer.

For example, in the Singers of Epic chapter he talks about an Epic Singer Mohan Bhopa and his wife Batasi. While a small part of the story is about Mohan, rest of the story revolves around the history and evolution of bhopas-the singers. The detailing and the attention to nuances makes it fascinating.

He has covered the length and breadth of India and has brought to the fore the stories behind many of those characters whom we know superficially, the story of their lives we never bothered to find out because to us they seemed too trivial. Each of these stories shows a different India, an India caught in a time-wrap, a country where different worlds co-exist side by side, visible worlds which remain invisible.

The finesse with which he intertwines the story of practices and the lives of practitioners leaves you mesmerised and you are simply gripped by the narrative.