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If
Aamir had played fair, would Asin have cried foul? |
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When
the Hindi Ghajini posters and hoardings hit the
streets, I saw only Aamir. I kept thinking that
there must be other posters and hoardings with
Asin in it that also acknowledges Murgadoss prominently
but I saw none. The only time I did see Aamir
and Asin together was on the cover of a Hindi
movie magazine promoting Ghajini.
And then, the alarm bells went off when Asin recently
spoke to the media about how shocked and wounded
she was that the movie promos did not include
her in a more visible way. (Very recently there
have been TV promos featuring her). A feeling
of déjà vu hit me: was this, after
all, another version of that old Bollywood attitude
of ‘oh those poor Kollywood cousins down
South, let’s give them a handout? We’ll
take what we want from them, and give them some
credit – but not too much’. It’s
true that Ghajini gives Asin and Murgadoss a Bollywood
break - should they just be content with this
juicy bone that’s thrown to them? Or should
they feel the Hindi version did not publicize
them enough?
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You could argue that Aamir could have gone with a known
Bollywood heroine. But then would it have been possible
for the star to leave her out of the posters? I might
be reading this entirely wrong and would like to give
the benefit of the doubt to Aamir Khan. But his co-star
(though she isn’t in the posters!) wondered herself
why there wasn’t more of her. The Hindi Ghajini
emerges as
an Aamir Khan solo. We had hoped at least Aamir would
play fair. If he had, would Asin be crying foul?
On a slightly different note, a Behindwoods visitor
and contributor from Malaysia, Sharmila Valli Narayanan,
points out that Bollywood movies dominate the market
there and pull in a bigger audience because they are
subtitled. She lamented the lack of subtitles for Tamil
films, feeling they would bring in the local Malay audience.
“In my own little way.” she says, “I
am doing my bit to promote Tamil films among non-Tamil
speakers and non-Indians by lending them DVDs with subtitles.
I lent a Malay friend of mine the Ayngaran DVD of SOK
which comes with superb subtitles, and she just loved
it and watched it 4 times. My Malay friend has now gone
through Kakhaa Kakhaa, Vel and Vaaranam Ayiram. She
is now a bona fide Surya fan, and would love to watch
a Tamil movie in the theater with me but, alas, I can't
take her because there are no subtitles.”
So Kollywood take note: a simple thing like subtitling
can bring in a fresh audience for Tamil movies in Malaysia
and Singapore. I would urge directors to go further
and subtitle Tamil prints that show in states outside
Tamilnadu. Rajiv Menon Hindi-subtitled the Delhi and
Mumbai prints of Kandukondain, Kandukondain and saw
packed houses. More recently Kamal English-subtitled
Dasavatharam prints, and this was widely appreciated
by non-Tamil speakers. Kollywood resorts to subtitling
only when they send a movie to a film festival but it
should become standard practice. If the entire Indian
film industry did this (the Mumbai industry simply assumes
everyone knows Hindi, and this just isn’t true
for most of South India) then we would all feel motivated
to see movies from each other’s region, appreciate
them more and celebrate them.
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