It indeed is fortuitous today that Eid has fallen on 9/11, today Ganesh Chaturthi is being celebrated all over, Jains festival as also Teej is being celebrated all over the country. It is one of the rare occasions where four festivals of four different communities have fallen on a single day, but do we tend to see any of the celebrations of these festivals on the silver screen these days? Inter-alia when was the last time when a prominent festival of the country was shown on the silver screen.
A caveat needs to be placed here that in Bhojpuri films as also in Marathi films and scores of films made in South India the regional flavor that becomes accentuated by giving a place to the local festivities, finds a prominent place, but not so in the Hindi films. For that matter when was the last time when a celebration of Eid on the cinematic screen was shown on the cinema, was it there in MY NAME IS KHAN? Indeed it was, but it was an Eid that was celebrated in USA which had a subdued template. For that matter Ganesh Chaturthi that is such an important festival celebrated in its finest manifestation all over Mumbai does not find any representation in the Hindi cinema in any form whatsoever.
What does this signify? Have our script writers lost the sense of festivities to include them in the content, or is it that the kind of content they are writing generally has an upper class bias, where festivities per se do not have much relevance, so as a logical extension it is presumed that India as a whole may not be missing it. But the point was proved by Rakeysh Om Prakash Mehra in DELHI-6 where he wove the Ram Leela of Delhi into a theme in a very intelligent manner.
If one were to contrast this with the festivities and celebrations that are shown in films made in other languages outside India, it would be found that nearly all the films make it a point to include these festivities as a representative cultural motif of the region. Cinema after all is a representation of the local culture, local festivities and with the platform of display expanded to all proportions, may be mainstream Hindi cinema also need to give a thought about inclusion of these occasions.
Merely doing lip service by releasing the films on these occasions is not going to help, the occasion should be leveraged to underline the changing format of these festivities as it is a reflection of the societal change through the panoramic view of the cinematic lens.
