The Boy from Rural Punjab

Yugam Sood was halfway through Tarsem Singh’s movie, Dear Jassi (2023), when he discovered his director’s pedigree. “I had no idea who he was. He was so humble and accessible,” says Yugam of the visionary filmmaker who has directed everything from cutting edge music videos to movies such as The Cell (2000) and The Fall (2006). Chosen at the first audition he ever gave, Yugam from Ahmedgarh near Ludhiana, won immense appreciation for his role as a rustic Punjabi boy who falls in love with a Punjabi Canadian, played by Pavia Sidhu, an actor and law graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles. What ensues is a tortuous mess of immigration woes and family differences. “I was told my co-star is from Hollywood and I was so nervous,” says Yugam, who dropped out of college in Malerkotla after five semesters because he was not getting the kind of support he wanted for his sporting career. Now after the success of Dear Jassi at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, where people came up to him in droves, he is planning to move to Mumbai. Anything after the comforting ease of his debut film will be tough, but Yugam is determined to do well. He still has elements of the shy boy who would eat by himself with his chair turned to the wall, and sweat bullets every time his co-star comes close to him, but he is learning to become more confident. Based on a real-life horrific murder in Punjab, the movie’s ethos of love and sacrifice has travelled across cultures, as has the performance of Yugam as a naïve but loving young man.

Affective Power

One of the reasons Amitabh Bachchan was so popular in Egypt, which I have personally experienced, is that former President Anwar-el-Sadat’s wife was a fan. This year, Swapnil Rai has written a thoroughly researched book on the globalisation of the Mumbai film industry, Networked Bollywood: How Star Power Globalised Hindi Cinema, published by Cambridge University Press. An assistant professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Rai mines archival material to show how the affective power of certain stars was translated into effective networks. She begins with Devika Rani and her husband Himansu Rai, who were able to bring German technicians to Mumbai until World War II interrupted the partnership. She narrates the story Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru told Prithviraj Kapoor, a Rajya Sabha MP, about what Joseph Stalin told him that his boy Raj was a great success in the Soviet Union with Awara (1951). That led to a film delegation being sent to the Soviet Union, and Raj Kapoor’s films being released in theatres there. Rai talks of the networks that are created when the star’s effective and affective powers are at their peak. She also notes the difference in Aishwarya Rai Bachchan’s pioneering global career and that of Priyanka Chopra- Jonas, the change being the agencies that represented them, as well as the latter’s move to the US for the network series Quantico. But Nargis, despite being a partner in RK Films, the star of the Oscar-nominated Mother India (1957), as well as the lead of the Indo-Russian film Pardesi (1957), directed by Vasili Pronin, was not able to leverage her power to have the kind of fandom in the former USSR that Raj Kapoor did.

Rewind

Remember Chhoti Si Baat (1976) and how Amol Palekar imagines Vidya Sinha and himself are on screen singing ‘Jaaneman jaaneman’ instead of Dharmendra and Hema Malini. Also remember how buses at one time were a staple in Hindi cinema. Directed by Basu Chatterjee, the song is an ode to the BEST bus, as much as the movie is a tribute to Mumbai. ‘Dekha na haye re’, picturised on a young Amitabh Bachchan, clad in all-lavender, in Bombay to Goa (1972), got him noticed after a series of flops. But when was the last time Hindi film actors stepped onto a bus? Perhaps Imtiaz Ali’s Jab We Met (2007) and Reema Kagti’s Honeymoon Travels Pvt Ltd (2007). In movies like Swades (2004), the bus was transformed into a well-equipped van which Shah Rukh Khan, playing a NASA astronaut, could use as a self-contained mobile home. But it says a lot about the use of public transport in big cities by those who can afford private cars and two-wheelers, as well as the state of our big cities, where buses are anything but a safe space for women.

Amitabh BachchanAmol PalekarBollywoodcinemaYugam Sood