Bollywood's paucity of ideas and banality of treatment

The Hindi film industry or "Bollywood", as it is termed popularly, certainly seems starved of creative ideas and originality these days. The same old themes are being flogged repeatedly like dead horses. Of late, the film releases have shown an appalling standard of freshness of ideas and treatment. 

The commercial films of Bollywood have never boasted of being very brilliant or thought-provoking at any time, but still there were gems here and there like Lagaan, the Munnabhai series, Rang De Basanti, Bheja Fry, Taare Zameen Par, etc., in the recent past, which were really good in terms of story and treatment. But now, with the exception of Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (which was very inspiring in theme, but filled with too many commercial elements), there is not a single film worth remembering. 

Lets not even talk about the 100/200/300 cr. club, which seems to include all trashy and mindless movies. I am referring to what was earlier called social or different cinema. We had masters like Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Bhimsain, Sai Paranjpe, Basu Chatterjee, Kundan Shah, even Raj Kumar Santoshi, who trod the middle line between hardcore commercial and art-house sensibilities, and gave us wonderful cinema that was socially relevant while being entertaining. Whatever happened to that line of cinema? Today Mr. Santoshi has reverted to silly comic capers, which cater shamelessly to the box office. Even Raj Kumar Gupta, who made the promising Aamir, Neeraj Sharma, who gave us A Wednesday, and Dibakar Banerjee, who showed promise with his first film, have turned ruthlessly commercial.

There is nothing wrong in making money in cinema, but there should be at least some traces of art or social relevance. There should be that indefinable something which distinguishes the brilliant from the mediocre. Otherwise, we cannot think of making a place in cinematic history. Neither can Hindi films hope to stand on the same platform as world cinema.