Ask not what your country can do for you. Review on Swades

?Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country?- John.F.Kennedy

?I hold him a traitor who having been educated at the expense of the masses does nothing to alleviate their misery?- Swami Vivekananda

These two quotes by two great men have always been inscribed in my mind since my childhood. There was an idealist in me some time back, but then once I started to get into my career and other mundane things, I guess that idealism has died in me quite a bit. But after having read about the concept of the latest Shah Rukh starrer Swades, I was quite interested in watching it and I finally managed to watch it, thanks to my company?s decision to take us all to a movie.

So was the movie really worth it all? Well yes and no, Swades has a fantastic concept of returning to one?s roots and there are some pretty good moments in the movie, but serious flaws in screenplay and execution prevent it from attaining classic status. So here is my take on the movie.

The Story

Mohan Bhargava (Shahrukh Khan) is an engineer working with NASA in US for quite some time. On the occasion of his parent?s death anniversary, he remembers his forster mother Kaveriamma(Kishori Bhallal) and yearns to meet her. On his return to Delhi, he is told that Kaveriamma has gone back to her native village of Charanpur. And so he sets out to Charanpur to meet her and bring her back with him to the US. In the village he meets Geeta( Gayatri Joshi) a school teacher.

As he encounters the poverty, the caste politics, the abysmal state of education and infrastructure there and worse the people?s attitude to accept things as they are, he decides to move back to US, with Kaveriamma. But due to certain incidents, he decides to stay back and fight it out. He fights for a change in the village and it?s inhabitants.

In this process he is aided by the local post master cum wrestler Nivaran( Rajesh Vivek) and a small time dhaba owner Mela Ram(Dayashanker Pandey) who dreams of making it big with a dhaba on the US super highways. How Mohan manages to awaken the villagers, his romance with Gita and whether he finally returns needs to be seen on the screen.

Swades has got many high points that mark it out from the typical Bollywood fare.

First things first Ashutosh Gowarikerneeds to be lauded for his courage and vision in attempting to look at the reality of India as it is. No sugar coating here, no speeches on the superiority of Indian culture vs the rest of the world, what is shown is simple reality. What Ashutosh has done is , he has simply put up a mirror to India and asked us to take a look at it.

Not a very pretty picture, but not a very depressing one either. One of the finest scenes in the movie is when Mohan admonishes one of the village elders to stop having a hangover about the superiority of Indian culture vis a vis the rest of the world, and instead exploit our potential. It?s a wake up call to people to stop living in the past glory of India and look to the future.. Consider the surfeit of movies which extol the virtues of Bharatiya sampradaya over the bad materialistic West, this is clearly a radical departure.

Also the issues that Gowarikar raises are so thought provoking, that it does make you think a lot.The tendency of us Indians to put the blame on every one,but not really trying to find out what the root problem is, the smug belief we have in our traditions instead of trying to move ahead with the times and our chalta hai attitude to all problems, are dealt with beautifully by Gowarikar in the movie.

The scenes where Mohan Bhargava confronts the villagers over their narrow minded attitude and refusal to change, the scene where Mohan motivates the villagers to send their kids to school, the electricity generation scene are all superbly shot by Gowarikar. The scenes between Mohan and Kaveriamma are shot with a blend of realism and warmth, and are easily some of the best scenes in the movie.

The romance between Gita and Mohan is finely delineated and doesn?t interfere with the main script. Its in fact to the credit of Ashutosh that he doesn?t deviate from the main narration at any stage. The technical values as usual are outstanding, and Rehman scores with his background music. The songs though not in the class of Lagaan are quite good enough. My favorites are Yuhin Chala Chal a fast slightly beat sort of road song, Yeh Taraa Voh Taara is quite good, but Aditya Narayan jars it with that lousy voice of his, and Sanwariyais again another good song by Alka Yagnik.

But what makes this movie short of classic status? Well noble as Ashutosh?s concept is, he does bite off more than he can chew, but trying to take on too many issue in one go. The problems besetting rural India are numerous- illiteracy, water, no power, caste politics, grinding poverty but in a 3 hour movie its just impossible to do justice to all the issues at one go. And that?s where Ashutosh falters as he tries to cram in too many issues at a time and loses focus very badly. The viewer is unable to understand what exactly the problem was, is it the lack of power, the drop out rate in village primary schools, the obstinate and narrow minded attitudes of villagers.

If we take some of the earlier village based movies they had a certain focus, like ?Do Bigha Zameen? was about land, ?Naya Daur? was about the problems faced by industrialization, ?Lagaan? was about the oppressive taxes farmers had to pay, but ?Swades? has too many points of focus and that proves to be the movies undoing.

Also the scene where Mohan brings power to the villagers should have been the deciding point for the protagonist to stay back, but instead he goes back to US, a song is played in background, and remembering everything he comes back to India. I mean what could have been the turning point becomes one more scene, and the last 15 minutes drags on, putting off many viewers.

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