Click to play videoNew Delhi: If Amitabh Bachchan represented the angry young man in the '70s and '80s, the new millennium may have just found a new icon - and he's neither young nor angry.
Munnabhai may well be the most loveable and accessible idol Bollywood has produced in recent times. Suddenly, taking law into your own hands like the DJ in Rang De Basanti is not a better bet, neither is playing a masked watered down version of Spiderman.
What's 'in' is having your own indigenous Mr Fixit, who's typically Bollywood and has also dusted the cobwebs off Gandhism and given it a spanking new look to it.
"Gandhi taught Munnabhai to be frank and truthful and not to force his opinion on others. I liked the concept," says a viewer.
"I am really impressed by this movie because Gandhi rocks in the movie," says another.
Lage Raho Munnabhai probably does what history textbooks and films on Gandhi failed to over the years. It makes Gandhi 'hip' and tenets like satya, ahimsa and satyagraha look 'cool'.
Ironically, it took an underworld don and his sidekick to do it.
Selling Gandhi through state machinery may be easy. But repackaging the Father of the Nation and his teachings without sounding preachy through Bollywood is no doubt a tough task. And this is exactly what the Munnabhai sequel has done.
Lage Raho Munnabhai cleverly co-opts Gandhian values along with the Father of the Nation himself and reinvents them in the popular Bollywood format interspersed with song and dance sequences, comic stereotypes - the works.
While it remains debatable as to whether a film can actually renew an entire generation's interest in Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and his teachings, a few extra copies of My Experiments With Truth are surely flying off the shelves this season in the wake of Lage Raho Munnabhai.
(With Simrat Ghuman)
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