This is first in a series of articles about Sholay, to be published here.

If you have watched Indian movies for long enough, you must have noticed the amount of belief Indian producers do have in fate. They roll out movies without any ground work, yet hope for gala box-office returns at the same time. They believe in targeting the jackpot blindfolded. Their ideas can be described at best as ill-conceived, scripts poorly written and their movie-making shoddy in nature.

What they normally seem to follow is, formula movie-making, where they have the liberty (rather compulsion) of adding as many emotional and dramatic twists in stories as they might wish to (stories that are stale as hell, anyway) and stuff in violent reprisals and half nude song items. There is no reason why such movies should be appreciated at the box-office. An industry that has not been successful in producing anything close to the Sholay cult since 1975, should seriously examine its reasons and try improving its craft.

Sholay Was No Accident

Contrary to what most Indian movie makers might seem to believe, Sholay was no one-time accident. Each scene, each action, each character, each song, the background music score, camera work and the flow and continuity of the whole movie spoke of dedicated efforts. It spoke of the time, energy and planning gone into making that epic. It also brought out some of the best performances seen in Indian movies ever, that of movie production, script writing, movie direction, music composition and the actors, a whole lot of them at their prime and in their best elements.

So, what made RGV (Ram Gopal Verma) think he could produce anything akin to Sholay? He is among the top Bollywood directors today, no doubt, but he also recently admitted how much speedily he makes those movies. How can he then think of producing a masterpiece like Sholay in four months (symbolic expression, am not considering the actual time taken for RGV’s AAG)? How can a movie-wallahs that loves announcing his next two movies beforehand, while still working on his ongoing project could think of reproducing Sholay? I never saw “Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag”, but had known its fate from the day it was announced.

I should stop now, and be back with more on this subject in the near future. Will try making a series of posts about Sholay in the next round.

PS – Btw, examine the interest taken by non-Indians in Sholay here.

GP Sippy is no more. He passed away at his home peacefully recently at the advanced age of 93. I fondly recall my childhood days when Sholay was creating waves and rewriting the very basic way of how Hindi Cinema should be produced. Shekhar Gupta once rightly said while carrying out an interview for the Indian Express, how Sholay had vertically divided the Indian Cinema into two distinct categories: the first one the pre-Sholay era, and the second one the post-Sholay phase! And I still remember how each of those flaming posters of Jay, Viru, Thakur, Basanti and Gabbar Singh used to distinctly read on GP Sippy’s signature everywhere.

I’ll have plenty of stuff to speak on regarding Sholay in the coming weeks and months, as I’ll try to write more about Hindi Films and its Music. But for now, let me share the following story from The New York Times, which carried a good brief on Sippy’s life and works. Btw, he was Gopaldas Parmanand Sippy, a born Sindhi and Karachiite before moving on to the dream city of Mumbai after India’s partition. And he had to do plenty of many other jobs before producing Sholay.

Unfortunately, there are no decent photographs of him available right now, and I just missed downloading it from one of those epapers the other day. To sum up, let me say, I salute the man who made Sholay and gifted the Hindi Cinema Lovers with an exceptional movie. It will continue to enthrall many more generations after you and myself had given up watching movies.

May god bless him with eternal peace!