Click to play videoMumbai: As the world remembers the victims of the 9/11 attacks in the US on its seventh anniversary, Bollywood seems to have embraced a new theme — terror in metros.
The push came after Anurag Kashyap's path-breaking movie Black Friday attempted to document the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts. The movie realistically depicted the dark world of Dawood Ibrahim and his henchmen for the first time.
Talking about his film, Anurag Kashyap says, "We had very little information to go with. So we decided to capture the enigma. We couldn't shoot Dawood realistically because the whole thing would have crashed then — if I just got an actor and said this is Dawood, the audience would not have believed it."
Post 9/11, the topic of Islamic terrorism has become a common reference point in Bollywood too. Aamir showed a Muslim doctor who refused to be indoctrinated by fundamentalists.
The terrorist, too, is now being presented in a well-researched and realistic manner. The portrayal of actor Naseeruddin Shah's character in the critically acclaimed movie A Wednesday is a fine example of that.
"The people who perpetrate these things look like ordinary people, and that I think is where this film succeeds brilliantly. It portrays the terrorists as an ordinary man," Naseeruddin Shah says.
Films like Mumbai Meri Jaan, Tahaan and A Wednesday bring the issue closer to common man — the fear of stepping into a local train, the dangerous stereotyping of religious communities and the frustration of not being able to fight back.
The success of films like Mumbai Meri Jaan and A Wednesday prove that these films are striking a chord with their audience.
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