Sweet Tooth For Barfi

Barfi is the new flavour of this festival season with film critics and YouTube enthusiasts having developed a sweet tooth for the movie by same name. They seem to be chomping on it with the same gusto as anchors of foodie shows on TV.

The movie whetted their appetites after it got selected to represent the country at Oscars. The movie makers in their pursuit for 'inspiration' have not even spared Korean and Japanese movies and quite unknowingly ended up providing a 'globalised' spot-the-original-scene contest for critics.

Plagiarism in Hindi and for those matter movies of any Indian language is as old as hills. Movie makers had no qualms in lifting themes, songs and their chances of getting caught was always as remote as noose around Ajmal Kasab.

Within India also this link is incestuous. A Tamil filmmaker may lift a story from Hindi movie, or a Malayalam film maker may lift it from Tamil.

However film makers over the years have become craftier about plagiarism. Gone are the days of lifting themes from just one film. Thus we had a movie like 1970s hit Love Story, based on Eric Segal's novel having 'inspired' many in India. The result was Ankhiyon ke jarokhon se in Hindi and Madanolsavam in Malayalam, which was also dubbed in Tamil as Paruva Mazhai. Now thanks to internet and satellite television, they copy scenes from dozens of films and that too not just from Hollywood.

But little do these filmmakers know that internet can be a double edged sword, as it has also made the viewers more savvy and hence their chances of not getting caught has come down drastically. During licence-permit raj days, very few could manage to travel abroad and even Hollywood films were hardly screened beyond metro cities. Hence they could get away with this daylight robbery on gullible film goers and those foreign filmmakers, whose themes were lifted, somehow were either unaware or thought it was not worth the trouble fighting legal battles amid India's heat and dust.

Lastly, the country's choice for Oscar entry for the Best Foreign Language category always ranged from intriguing to downright silly. So far, barring Tamil movie Jeans, only Hindi films have been chosen for that honour. Most often the chosen films have more to do with star appeal and marketing potential than quality of acting or theme.