Red and Silver Kolhapuris land on the ground and make pink dust fly all around. Then there’s an arm, with a chunky bracelet — MSG. A lion with a pair of wings flies into the screen. There’s a pair of eyes, smiling, calm, God knows what. A man clad in colourful purple-pink-red-blue-yellowish ‘costume’, sporting a beard, breaks into the screen. Clenched fists, gaudy costumes, whacking hooligans and making them fly — this is the new age hero.
The name is Saint. Saint Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Ji Insan, you might have heard the name before. He’s a self-styled Godman. There’s so many of them in India, what’s the big deal with this one then? He’s different, because he’s the ‘love charger’. Well, he’s starred in, produced a movie and directed it too.
Messenger of God, he is!
He’s a man who’s whipped up miracles, cured the incurable, all with his immense powers as the messenger of God — all, only in his movies, but obviously. So powerful and impactful is his movie, that the Censor Board Chief Leela Samson quit. Not quite, actually. His movie Messenger of God was slated to release on Friday. Incidentally, the Censor Board did not clear it. However, much to the relief and joy of the several ‘fans’ the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal gave it the green signal.
Irked by the FCAT’s decision to bypass her and clear the film, Censor Board chief Leela Samson called it quits. The bigger question, however, is not why she quit, but why such a hullabaloo over a movie that quite frankly, looks harmless; looks like a comic relief, to be precise.
The objections raised by the Censor Board include the fact that Ram Rahim Singh plays a God and cures illness magically. Err, well, it’s a creative medium, so people can portray anyone, right? When you have people playing politicians and actors in biopics and ghosts and spirits in other movies, why is the depiction of God in the form of a human being such a big deal? To add to that point, Ram Rahim Singh stars as Saint Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Ji Insan, the Insan in the end making it very obvious that he is, in fact, playing a human being.
If it’s just looking at things from the ‘logic’ point of view, then this film is frankly on the edge. I mean the hero emerging from an ice-block, smashing the villains all over the screen, and making the seemingly impossible look like it’s nobody’s business. But then, how many Indian films are shelved because of an apparent lack of logic? None. In fact, most of them go on to join the 100-crore club, making it obscenely obese and robbing the movie goers of all excitement possible.
The only one reason from stopping this movie from hitting the screens is the fashion police. Garish outfits, clownish looks and a comedy of errors in terms of look and make up could very well cause blindness to people who dare to watch him. Other than that, there’s no other reason from stopping a perfectly nonsensical movie from releasing.
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