Gentlemen and hopefully some ladies, the good news is that blog post season is in full bloom now and the day shall be enriched by not one, not two but three solid, jhakaas ek dum timepass articles. To put it all in a nutshell, the three topics for discussion before the house today are:

The Rang de Basanti movie review
Ya, ya … I know it’s a little stale by now and most of the Indian multiplex going, cell phone toting masses have already discussed it to bits but the fact of the matter is that I have been propounding a certain perspective to the movie amidst long suffering friends and it has been fairly well received; which basically means that I have not been whacked even once subsequent to me giving my opinion on the subject.

To get to the point, I think the movie can be analyzed at three levels ..

Level 1: The basic essence or message of the movie; as in what the director is trying to say. For example the basic message of “neal n nikki” would be “GO DIE !!!”.. assuming that you get the general idea we shall now proceed to level 2.

Level 2: This level is concerned with how the director goes about conveying this message in terms of events shown in the movie and storyline. Thus, you have a tale of three friends in DCH told through a canvas that alternates and pans across times and geographies, good stuff that. However, I must restrain the waxing-eloquent-about-DCH bit and proceed to the next level.

Level 3: This would be the level where you go beyond vision statement and do the mission execution bit. This would then deal with script, acting, music et al. The entire issue, of course, gets resolved when you have a Hashmi starrer; one Himesh Reshammiya song, one Emraan Hashmi with vacuum cleaner powered lips, one or more of generally well endowed women and minimal clothing comprise a MECE (If you don’t know what that means, you need to hire ATK to reorganize your company’s vision, strategy, organization structure and other such like stuff) list. That’s it. Game over.

Now that the frame of reference is set, it only remains to map RdB onto this framework. At levels 1 and 3, I think the movie rocks. Absolutely. It is at level 2 that I find myself disagreeing with the movie. But definitely one of the most courageous movies in recent times, which deals with an issue which I am sure lots of people recognize and are concerned about. And that, apart from the excellent photography, music and Aamir Khan is enough to justify a dekho.

PS: For those who keep count, the other 2 articles are in the pipeline and shall be churned out from assembly before the day is out ...