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At the fateful session at Jaipur, minutes before Ashis Nandy\u2019s unfortunately worded statement, fellow panelist Richard Sorabjee spoke about the limits of free speech and how hate speech is defined in India. \u201cDeliberate malice\u201d is the phrase he used, saying that only something that was deliberately intended to denigrate a person or community could justifiably be censored. Nandy\u2019s comments clearly did not fall under this criterion, and if the same standard is applied to Kamal Haasan\u2019s Vishwaroopam (released in Hindi as Vishwaroop), the recent protests against its release seem decidedly unjustified, silly even.\nIn V for Vendetta, when Evey Hammond finds that Stephen Fry\u2019s character owns a Quran, she asks him whether he is a Muslim. \u201cNo, I\u2019m in television,\u201d he replies. That would be a better reading of Haasan\u2019s film: by no means a better version of Innocence of Muslims, but a very commercial film where religion is incidental to a plot that simply aims to entertain rather than make a sociological point. Haasan has said that this film is a tribute to Muslims, that they will send him a \u201clot of biriyani for Eid next year\u201d. That is unlikely, and one suspects that such statements were made more for publicity reasons than anything else. The protestors claim that the film is regressive because the terrorists are Muslim, while he claims it is progressive because the RAW agent chasing them is also one. Neither is particularly valid; both have occurred in film before to mixed results.
\nThe plot \u2013 for anybody who doesn\u2019t know already \u2013 is fairly simple. Vishwanath (Haasan) is a Kathak dancer who is actually a RAW agent working to thwart a terrorist plot by Omar (Bose), the commander of a terrorist group he had earlier infiltrated in Afghanistan. The plot involves exploding a dirty bomb, for which Omar\u2019s cohorts have been stealing cesium from radiotherapy machines made by a company for which Vishwanath\u2019s wife Nirupama (Kumar)\u00a0works. The wife, of course, is clueless about her husband\u2019s secret life, which leads to some humour inspired by True Lies. Once everyone knows everything, it is a fairly run-of-the-mill chase sequence, all of which rather cynically builds up to a sequel, the horrendous trailer for which is shown at the end of the movie. Interspersed are flashbacks of his years in Afghanistan, which by no means depicts the terrorists as black-and-white bad guys, but people fighting for an ideal (with no judgement made on the validity of that ideal). Neither are they shown as overtly heroic. \u201cFirst it was the British who came, then the Soviets, the Americans, and now the Taliban,\u201d a woman tells Omar after an American raid on her village. \u201cWhat are men but monkeys with tails in the front?\u201d
\nOn the contrary, if anyone comes out of this movie looking bad, it has to be the Americans. \u201cWe fight for Allah, but the Americans fight for petrol,\u201d says one terrorist. \u201cIf you laid out barrels of petrol in front of them, they would bow down in namaaz.\u201d Later, the FBI agents who arrest our heroes are shown to be typically racist, with much unfortunate humour drawn from their moronic statements. One interrogator, for instance, on finding out that that Ashmita\u2019s God has four arms, comes up with this gem: \u201cSo how do you crucify him?\u201d The events of the film take place after the killing of Osama (the terror plot involved is revenge), and Haasan and his RAW colleagues rather maturely condemn the euphoria among the Americans after the event, while acknowledging that it might be justified after the pain of 9\/11.
\nJudged when shorn of religious blinkers, Vishwaroop is a fairly competent action thriller, with some cerebral plot twists, that, if anything, errs on the side of caution when it comes to Muslim sentiments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"