Saturday 29 August 2015

Indrani Mukherjea Saga: Reality TV Trumps Soap

Real life has trumped reel, or fact has outwitted fiction in its own game. The Sheena Bora murder mystery is turning out to be far racier than the wildest imagination of Bollywood script writers and TV news channel owners are already feeling giddy and wet dreaming about record-breaking spikes in TRP. 

The fact that the prime characters happen to be a high profile family and the arch villain Indrani Mukherjea, with no wealth or lineage, had reached this social upper crust by using her social climbing skills has added a dash of pizzazz to the tale.
 

However had some Bollywood film maker made a film based on a similar story line before this infamous incident unfolded on our TV screens, it would have been riddled with hurdles. First of all not many producers would have been intrepid enough to finance such a macabre script, with no heroes and easily more than fifty shades of villainy. In the next stage it would have run into trouble with censors, who would have advocated many cuts to make it Bharatiya sanskriti compliant.
 

After release the critics would have made a mincemeat out of it. Probably this is how Rajeev Masand would have reviewed the movie:

It would be gross understatement to say that the movie plot is too convoluted: A second wife of her third husband is charged along with her second husband of killing her daughter from her first husband who was having affair with her third husband's son from his first wife.
 

The plot is riddled with holes and leaves many things unexplained. The third husband has no idea whether the murdered girl is his wife's sister or her daughter. The girl goes missing for two years and everybody in the extended family has readily believed that she had gone to US.
 

The police also come across as bumbling idiots who do not pursue the case after stumbling across a body cut to pieces and packed in a suitcase. Surely the script writer has not done his homework and was way too lazy to tie up such loose ends.
 

A boring feast of gore and deceit. Watch it only at your peril. I would go with half out of five for this tedious mind numbing crime mystery marred by a brain dead script!!
 

But the recent events have proved that truth can be far spicier than fiction! And the harried middle class has found a new 'fix' to escape from their daily drudgery by gawking and tut-tutting at the permissiveness of the amoral rich on their 56-inch LCD screens.

To cash on this sentiment Bollywood scriptwriters may be busy pounding on their laptops, over numerous cups of 'cutting chai' or 'chhotta pegs', to churn out a blockbuster based on this 'true story'. Hopefully critics would take a more considerate view towards the bizarre twists and turns in the plot once these films are released.

Also Read: Bangalore Beat