OK, this is high praise, but Gulaal hits you at both levels. It gets you at gut level and you come out marveling at the amount of thought and detail that has gone into it. And a second viewing gives you more detail, more thought. After all, you are dealing with a film, which, in addition to everything else, is giving you all sorts of throwaway stuff which it doesn’t expect most of you to notice, like the brand names of all the booze that the characters drink. And the lyrics. The lyrics. A very strange thing to say for a man who is not very good at either Hindi or Urdu, and has never paid any attention to the words in a song (I mean, who gives a damn for lyrics, for god’s sake!), but these lyrics get you by the crotch. A nautch girl in a small town in Rajasthan sings to drunk louts in a haveli: “Jaise door des ke tower mein ghus jaaye re aeroplane” (The way aeroplanes flew into towers in a far-away country). She follows it up with: “Jaise sare aam Iraq mein jaake jam gaye Uncle Sam” (The way Uncle Sam shamelessly settled in Iraq). The lyrics of the songs in Gulaal, especially the closing song, as the (for the lack of a better word) protagonist stumbles back home after being shot—Oh ri Duniya, oh ri Duniya, aye duniya/Aye surmayee aankhein ke pyaalo ki duniya (I won’t even attempt to translate this)—can give you gooseflesh.

... contd.