Copycats?

Is there something intrinsic in the world of entertainment and creativity these days that causes people to eschew all attempts at originality and look to the Western world for ideas they can filch? I mean, look at some of the biggest releases in the Hindi film world in recent times - Fanaa, for instance, has been taken from Ken Follett's extremely well-written and gripping spy thriller, Eye of the Needle. Alag is a direct lift from the 1995 Hollywood film Powder, which starred Sean Patrick Flanery (see photographs above - note, especially, the similarity not only in the lead characters' appearances, but in their stances in the picture right at the bottom of the Alag poster, and that in the poster for Powder. Talk about dead ringers!) in the title role. Kaante, as everyone knows, was taken from Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. What I don't understand is, first, why people in our country have to resort to plagiarism at the drop of a hat - and that too, do so without any compunction. Is it that we have a genuine dearth of good ideas in the so-called creative minds ruling the roost in our country? Or that these minds are just too lazy to exert themselves so as to come up with something original when it's so much easier to have someone else do the thinking and visualising, and just copy their end results?

I tend to believe it's the latter - and here I'm not considering great film-makers like Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Shyam Benegal, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, but the ones churning out the mainstream Bollywood flicks. And somewhere, we tend to view this mindless copying as something laudatory. Just a couple of days ago, I read this gushing article on Rakesh Roshan's new film Krrish - and it was all about how the visual effects in this film are exactly like the ones in Hollywood films. India can finally make films whose visual appeal matches that of Hollywood, the writer stated proudly. And sure, we know that - all of us have been reminded inexorably of Neo (of Matrix fame) when we've caught sight of Hrithik Roshan in the film's trailers. I agree that the fact that we now have the technology to rival that of Hollywood is a source of pride - but why can we not put it to some original use? We've all seen the marvellous things American and British film-makers can do - how about finding out what the Indian ones can do with the same resources?

And why do I say that we don't think there's anything wrong in plagiarising? Because I haven't yet come across anyone who's asked this question before. Because the same people who plagiarise with such impunity actually have the audacity to claim ownership - the Alag director, for instance, went on record telling the media how it's his special project, how a friend of his gave him the script and he loved it, how intense the whole experience of preparing the lead character's 'look' was - yeah, right! I mean, how intense could copying Sean Patrick Flanery's albino look have been? Though, of course, the well-muscled hero with the cool shades in Alag couldn't come even remotely close to capturing the vulnerability that Flanery brought to his performance (again, see the last picture of Flanery as Powder) - and no one, not even the film critics, ever slam them for it, not even when they calmly state in their reviews that such-and-such film was a rip-off from so-and-so. Remember what happened when the Kaavya (she of the plagiarised Opal Mehta fame) story broke? As someone in the publishing industry, I was extremely interested - I read every article, participated in discussions in forums, spoke to friends - and I was appalled by the fact that there was hardly anyone prepared to condemn her for her actions, or consider her culpable. Mitigating circumstances, everyone screeched, lack of ethics in the publishing world. All right, but what about her own ethics? She was old enough to know right from wrong - and there are mitigating circumstances in everyone's lives. Do we then make excuses for everyone who does something not quite right?

Yet another example - last week HT City carried a story, complete with photographs, on how fashion photographers have been copying photos taken by photographers abroad for their calendars - so there was Bipasha Basu doing a J Lo, and Priyanka Chopra aping Britney Spears. And the photographers went a step further by actually claiming copyright for these pictures! I'm actually genuinely puzzled at this lethargic attitude and steadily declining originality in everything we do. Are we denegerating into a nation of copycats? And am I the only one, to quote the Dixie Chicks, who ever felt this way?