Bollywood lives

Illustration/Uday Mohite

The bad qualities of The Roshans on Netflix are so obvious that it feels almost impolite to point them out. That is how we are trained to expect less and embrace mediocrity, I suppose.

Despite its many demerits, the show does achieve two things. One, it reminds us of that first moment of utter pleasure when we watched Hrithik Roshan dance on screen. All the marketing in the world cannot create the magic and alchemy of something true and beautiful.

Two, in Episode 3 on Rakesh Roshan, the show reveals a quintessential Bollywood life. In his tale of a bigda ladka thrust into adulthood by the sudden death of his father, is the struggle of being thrust to the margins from the centre in a split second and trying to fight his way back into the inside. As an assistant director, he tries to make himself indispensable by organizing parties for his boss and "people would say that's Roshanji's son, doing all this." He fails to make his mark as an actor or a producer. At parties photographers ask him to step out of photographs. It's a brutal world in which success comes after grinding humiliation. Bollywood is indeed about families--a world of wounded men with absent fathers who yearn to be inside the charmed circle of love that only success can guarantee.

These are the very tales of outsiders and underdogs Bollywood once excelled in telling. In a society as hierarchical as ours, this pain is one many know and so it could connect with visceral force to a mass audience.

But while we appreciate the struggles of the Roshans, including Hrithik, there is a certain falsity when one the narrative is shaped by the flip side of success, which is power and the desire to be unquestioningly praised. The Roshans' own story is let down by their inability to allow a more autonomous creative voice to tell their tale.

The show's tone is servile. Its visual language is slack jawed, with no consistency or imagination in how archival footage or re-enactments are used. Some "interviews" are so hokey they keel over into so-bad-it's-good territory. Anil Kapoor does an improv version of himself. Sanjay Leela Bhansali speaks in polite and empty superlatives. Prem Chopra suddenly appears for one soundbyte and vanishes. Sonu Nigam takes several murkis without a clear destination. Shahrukh Khan, Javed Akhtar and Honey Irani are insightful and engaging as always but never present with fullness. Susanne Khan is conspicuously absent. Priyanka Chopra empahsises that the Roshans "make their table longer" because nahi nepotism nahin, yaniki the ghost of Kangana haunts these tales. Hrithik Roshan sounds like the Bollywood version of Jaggi Vasudev.

Most disappointingly the show struggles to really tell us about Roshan, a great composer in an era of great composers. How did such a person come to be? How did he create an audacious masterpiece like Na toh Karwan ki Talash hai? What about the fascinating woman he married, a singer who some say collaborated on some compositions?
Bollywood lives are stories of chancers and grifters, poets and drifters, madness, romance, power and cruelty. These epic narratives struggle to breathe in the confines of these boring corporate films masked as documentaries.

That those who enchanted us with their compelling films cannot, or will not, have an equally captivating cinema about their lives - is everyone's loss.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com