Why This is a Bad Idea.

Krishna Shah must be an incurable optimist. After all, he has been collating material and redrafting the script for this one since the past 3 decades, which he surely thinks would be his magnum opus. He has the money and he has the connections. But we still think this is a lost cause. A movie made on Indira Gandhi is best left to the imagination, where it will be shot, edited, viewed and then cremated.

A little history on the subject while we are at  the attempts made to immortalize the Iron Lady of Indian politics on screen. N Chandra ( Tezaab, Style ) tried to make Manisha Koirala play Mrs.Gandhi in his project tentatively titled Indira Gandhi : A Tryst With Destiny in 2007, he never got beyond the idea stage. The First Family of Indian politics took offence and made sure it withered away. Jagmohan Mundhra ( the master of direct-to-video erotic thrillers) has tried ( and is still trying ) to make his opus on Sonia Gandhi with Italian actress Monica Ballucci in the lead. The current ruling matriarch from the Family kept her studious silence and he also  got slapped by a legal notice from the Party. The reaction from Mrs.Sonia Gandhi was that “she was amused” about the whole project.

The stumbling block is not the dearth of ideas, the problem is tolerance. How many of us remember the witch-hunting that followed  Amrit Nahta’s Kissa Kursi ka., a scathing movie of the effect of Sanjay Gandhism had  the Nation?
Indira Gandhi is said to have confiscated the entire prints and had it burned. There is so much at stake and the web of political power, image, subservience is so dangerously intertwined that it is just near to impossible to get a factual and objective overview from the powers that be. No amount of research and incisive data can tide over the inertia of intolerance that seem to surround the power centers. You will have no idea who will individually take offense at the slightest pretext of any screen adaptations or recreations of events that is not presented in a ‘politically correct’ way without ruffling any feathers in the Party. That is a tall order. You would rather not go the whole hog if you get the Big Picture.

Let’s say you multiply all this a hundred fold when it comes to Mrs.Indira Gandhi.
A legacy and a life that could be best described tumultuous and authoritarian, inspiration would be too profound a term to describe her 15 years in leading the Nation.The wounds caused by alleged authoritarian excesses are still fresh and that doesn’t bode well when you are making a screen version of an “inspirational life.” It just ain’t good commercial sense, you see.

Moreover, as a Nation, we have an aversion to biopics of our own leaders. Well, Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi  was above all these holier-than-thou posturing, because of the fact that the Father of the Nation is a subject that is about a  political and spiritual leader who led India to independence and inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. And that, whether you like it or not is a powerful subject with a canvas that is the delight for any movie goer. But with Indira Gandhi, you take a rain-check. Take the case of any mainstream movie modeled on our ‘leaders, Ketan Mehta’s Sardar (1995),  or Jabar Patel’s Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar (2000)  or Shyam Benegal’s Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero (2005). There, you get the idea!

For Krishna Shah it might seem like his magnum opus on the outside.

But inside, its still our bungling, bumbling holier-than-thou perverse sense of political correctness which will stifle it to death.

Watch the trailer of the only biopic that we loved and cherished here.