Bollywood has a solution to Naxal problem
Panaji | Monday, Nov 30 2009 IST
 

The government and its security machinery may be groping in the dark for a solution to the Maoist violence, but Bollywood, it seems, has already found the answer.

Like it deals with other social issues like political corruption, the Naxal menace too is annihilated through the bullets from an angry hero, who takes on the Red guerrillas single handed. In 'Red Alert - The War Within' by Ananth Mahadevan, which had its Indian premiere at the 40th International Film Festival of India here, the quick work is done by actor Suniel Shetty, who plays the role of a poor cook who finds himself amid Maoists while pedalling a cycle to the forest to deliver food packets to them.

The director says he has "made an honest film, which does not cater to the Hindi formula". But watching the film gives an opposite view. Shetty is Narasimha, who lives in the Naxal-infested Khammam district of Andhra Pradesh. An encounter between the police and the Naxals just as he was handing over the food packets see Shetty fall into the company of the guerrillas. Though he is not happy with the Maoists, Shetty continues to live with them in the forest and even receive arms training for operations. From a "poor cook", he soon graduates to a fearless individual, once dodging bullets of the police to save the lives of two children during a Naxal attack on a school where the police were hiding weapons. Shetty then goes on to kill the Naxal 'dalam' leader and finally hijacks a police mission, to end the menace, once and for all.

"The idea for the film came from a newspaper report. Its headlines said: "We both fired, he missed, I didn't." The report was about a poor farmer who goes on to kill a Naxal leader after being trapped in the movement," says Mahadevan, who adds that the timing of the film is a coincidence. The first half of the film, set in 2007, is a peep into the lives of the guerrillas and their ideology. The second half is about taking their lives. The film won the Director's Vision Award at the Stuttgart Film Festival in Germany. 'Bandit Queen' fame Seema Biswas carries on, as a guerrilla in the film, which also has Naseeruddin Shah and Vinod Khanna.

Shetty said he did a "lot of homework" for the movie. "The Maoists are not revolting against the country. It is the system they are not happy with," he says, adding terrorism and the Naxal issue were different. "We have to first put our house in order," he added. The film will hit the screens in January next year.

-- (UNI) -- 30DR14.xml

 

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