MBA student Vikram Pandit( Arunoday Singh) has a plan for the upliftment of India’s oppressed tribals and the end of the ‘Naxal problem’: selling earthen pots they make to the world via a smartphone app. “Let’s cut out the middleman… Christie’s and eBay are ready to buy.” He thinks it’s genius. You know it sounds imbecilic.
Writer-director Vivek Agnihotri – the maker of such drivel as Zid, Chocolate, and Hate Story – thinks Buddha in a Traffic Jam is his piece de resistance. By the end of it, this too, appears just as amateur and laughable
What Buddha… is instead, is propaganda disguised as cinema. The film is divided into a dozen odd chapters. The prologue opens, if you’ll believe it, in 2000 BC. A tribal man in Bastar is chopping wood with an axe. The Iron Age dates back to around 1200 BC, but never mind that. Cut to 2014. A tribal man is still chopping wood. Historical veracity notwithstanding, the statement is a good one: little has changed for him. Except, he’s now caught in the cross-fire of the government-Naxalite fight.
