Sholay itself gets its story from The Magnificent Seven, which acknowledges that it is inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. Entire sequences in Sholay — like the train dacoity, the killing of Thakur’s family, the final standoff when Jai forces Veeru and Basanti to flee — are lifted from films like Once Upon A Time In The West and The Professionals. But at every step, Sholay used the springboard of the already-done to hit new highs of style and adrenaline. For instance, every sequence that I mentioned is actually filmed much better in Sholay than in the originals. It copies just one five-second shot from Seven Samurai, of dacoits riding their horses as an enormous sun rises behind them, and does it better. There’s a fine line between inspiration and plagiarism, but it’s also not so fine as to be missed by most. When the Battleship Potemkin sequence of a pram rolling down the Odessa Steps is reprised in Grand Central station in Brian de Palma’s The Untouchables, and during a bank robbery scene in N. Chandra’s Tezaab, there’s a difference. Sholay teaches you that difference.

The question is: Why can’t we leave some things alone? Just let them be? Why do we have to have a remake of/ tribute to Sholay, where the Gabbar Singh character plays the mouth organ?

Or, if we do have to remake, why can’t we be Pierre Menard? In Argentine uber-author Jorge Luis Borges’ wildly funny story masquerading as a literary review, a man called Pierre Menard attempts to rewrite Don Quixote. Which he does, punctuation mark by punctuation mark. And the narrator (the reviewer of the few chapters of Quixote that Menard managed to rewrite) finds the “new” work far more affecting than the original. Where a comma put by Cervantes is sterile today, four centuries later, Menard’s comma comes tingling with meaning and subtext.

... contd.