If Mars really attacked... Review on Naseeruddin Shah

When Redmars tumbled out of the medium-sized spaceship, he couldn’t help but curse his engineers for having so grossly underestimated Earth’s gravity. He just couldn’t believe that someone who can calculate escape velocities and atmospheric gradients over millions of miles would not go that extra mile (in a manner of speaking) in ensuring that the ship’s occupants would have a soft landing on the target planet. Then he heard his advisers behind him and noted that the ‘occupants’ in the previous sentence should have been ‘occupant’ because Smallmars and Nomars were holding their postures as they would on any other city on Mars. Apparently the landing only affected the first person to descend on the planet. Redmars shrugged. There is a downside to everything, he thought philosophically, even to being the ruler of a planet.

These thoughts only took a little while to flash across his brain; in fact, there is a good chance that Redmars would never remember to admonish his engineers about the faulty landing, because just as he was regaining his posture, he found himself staring at the most repulsive thing he had ever seen. Here was a being with four long tube-like tentacles extruding from all four sides of its body with little tentacles appearing out of two of the top ones. The head (if you could call it that) seemed to be punched with hooles that appeared to serve no purpose until one of the hooles moved curiously and a sound came out that made no sense to him. If he had not been disoriented due to the fall, he would have recognised that the organism standing in front of him was a human being; after all, he had been studying them for a good part of the last twenty eight Martian days.

The little hoole moved again and the sound came out again, but this time Redmars had the good sense to re-adjust his translator near his auditory organs in time to catch the last four words: ‘Who are you freaks?’

Redmars’ reply would have seemed loud to the man, but the translator was carefully modulating the pitch of the voice to suit the dynamic range of the human ear. What he heard, instead, was a very serene voice saying, “Shut up, Earthman. Another word from you and your planet will be blown to dust. We are Martians. We don’t come in peace. We are here to kidnap your best actor. The only problem is that we don’t know who that is. So I want you to help me find the best actor in your land. We have been watching some of your movies so we have some idea, but we would like an inside opinion too, and if you refuse…”. He deliberately let that sentence hang in mid-air.

The man couldn’t help but smile. He knew that the Martian’s voice was actually rising up and down in pitch, reverberating air molecules to amplitudes which are probably way too high for his ear to handle. The translator was rather a crude design, he thought, because it was apparently converting every sample of the Martian’s voice into the same pitch, which made for a curious monotone of speech which rendered the intended effect of the half-threat redundant. But he was no fool. He understood the implications. He said, “Okay, so you want our best actor. So what are we talking? Hollywod or Bollywood?”

Redmars turned to look curiously at Smallmars and Nomars but was only thrown helpless glances in return. Sighing, he turned back to the man and said, “You mean, there is another film industry called Hollywood which didn’t even bother to come up with a name that sounds different? I can see the marketing potential of so blatantly copying the name of your industry but I would have thought people would be more creative than that.”

A smile again. “Heh, yeah, but what can you do? The marketing benefits, I am sure, far outweigh the creative impulses. So I am guessing you don’t want anything to do with an industry that can’t even think of a proper name for itself?”

“That is so. We have been following your movies for the last few days and we have narrowed our choices to three actors; Shahrukh Khan, Aamir Khan and Amitabh Bachchan. Let us start with the first. What do you think of him? We noted his achievements in various films he has done and the number of awards he has received during his career, and all things being equal, we certainly prefer him over the other two.”

The man cringed. He was one of the slowly growing cult of Shahrukh-haters in India. He said with more than an edge to his voice, “No! Don’t look at the awards he has won. Look at his roles. No matter what he plays, he is the same; he has the same smile, the same snigger, and even the same hair. Now look at Aamir Khan. He has acted in a wide variety of roles, blending his style to suit the needs of his character. Even Amitabh has done that, to an extent. But not Shahrukh!” He went on. “To be honest, none of the three you have short-listed even comes close to being the best. There is a fourth. His name is Naseeruddin Shah.”

Redmars’ eyebrows – if he had them – would have risen in surprise and his voice, if the translator was absent, would have carried a tinge of curiosity in it. The end result, however, was a perfectly modulated “Oh?”

“Yes! Over his career, he has shown all possible facets of a human being in his roles. Don’t go for the overly dramatic Shahrukh, or for the supposedly versatile Aamir, or for the grand Amitabh. What more can you ask of an actor but the remarkable character of versatility? Naseeruddin Shah does as well as any other actor in any role, if not better.”

Redmars said uncertainly, “Versatility.”, and then as if he was chewing on the word, said it again, this time with more conviction, “Versatility. You have to understand that we are not as developed in art as we are in science. People have said that our scientific endeavours have come at the expense of our art, and that is the main reason we have come here for an actor. We think your planet has developed more artistically compared to ours. So you will forgive me if I sound ignorant, but what exactly is this versatility? How do I detect it in an actor?”

The man chewed thoughtfully on his inner cheek. He had himself never asked that question, so he had to think for a while before he said, “It is a fairly subjective thing. I usually go by whether a facet of an actor is something which I have seen before very often or not. For example, if you take Shahrukh’s movies for example, all his portrayals tend to remind you of his other roles. Naseer’s movies offer a relatively new experience each time to the viewer, presenting him with a new face of the actor in each movie. This trait in an actor is what we Earthlings call ‘versatility’. How you detect it is very much a personal thing, which is why we see opinion being divided to such an extent on this matter.

Redmars nodded, understanding. “Hmm, I seem to understand. And this versatility is considered good…why?”

The man stood there looking, thinking. Never before has he asked himself that question. Why, after all, should an actor be versatile? He was still thinking the matter over when Redmars grabbed the opportunity to speak again.

(Continued in the comments section...I promise I will never ever do this again)