No, I am not going to talk about this joke of a film. Even though just one viewing tells you that Varma understood nothing about why Sholay grabbed that special place in people’s hearts, understood nothing even though he, as he claims, saw it 35 times or more. When you replace that magnificent mountainous terrain with the seedy bylanes of a Mumbai suburb, you scale an epic down to a grimy pirated copy of a self-help book being sold by beggars at traffic lights. And when you have Jai (Raj in this film) beaten and shot dead at point blank range by the Gabbar character, you violate the memory of his mythic death in the original, while fighting off dozens of dacoits and blowing up a bridge to make sure that Veeru and Basanti escape safely. You just haven’t got it, boy, and you won’t, even if you put Sholay on a chip and implant it under your skin.

Sorry, I had promised I wasn’t going to talk about this, this sick travesty that’s playing on a screen in your neighbourhood. I was going to talk about remakes. And even when you do a remake, you can escape the tyranny of mass memory by pretending it’s not one. Sholay has been rehashed many times, and during my misspent youth, I had the opportunity to see two of them. One was Aandhi Toofan, where Sholay’s horses were replaced by motorcycles. The Thakur Baldev Singh character was played by, yes, Hema Malini. Then there’s Paanch Qaidi, with, well, yes, Girish Karnad as the hero, and Amjad Khan on the side of the good guys: quite an enjoyable film, except that whoever made it couldn’t count, since the actual number of qaidis hired to kill the villain is higher than five. But the point is that neither film referenced Sholay officially; the makers were smart enough to figure that one out.

... contd.