Deconstructing Gandhigiri

I have become an addict! I went to yet another Bollywood movie and this time it was Lage Raho Munna Bhai. Before I go into the movie itself I should point out that enough has been said about this subject. I did a quick Google on Gandhigiri and found articles not just in The Hindu and The Times of India but also in The Washington Post
and Christian Science Monitor. Of course wikipedia already has a good entry and there is a site www.gandhigiri.org.

The movie itself was very entertaining. For a person with Hindi handicap it works perfectly well because it is total Mumbaiya. No urdugiri here! It was a surprisingly clean movie too. Considering the main characters are gangsters there was no dishum-dishum thrown in. There was even a dream sequence but without any gyrating females. The female was pretty but dignified. The best part of the movie was the script and dialogues. They were just fantastic. It reminded me of Crazy Mohan's dialogues in Tamil movies. The attention to detail was also something I discovered could happen in Bollywood movies too! A couple of examples. The chamcha thug walks into a corporate building to meet someone and looks at the receptionist and says "Oy enquiry". The way they explain hallucination was also done very well, "brain may chemical locha". Of course the movie was a bit simplistic and naively optimistic.

But, does it hurt being naively optimistic? May be not....