MAOIST and Naxal killings are now coming closer to our cities, according to latest intelligence reports. And Bollywood is going into the hinterland to find out what went wrong in the villages for people to be carried away by the violence. It takes some guts to break the cast and take an opposite view, and that is what director Anant Mahadevan’s latest flick is all about.
Red Alert, unlike most Bollywood movies, dares to take a violence-is-not-romantic thrust and is powerfully delivered. The characterisation of the protagonist played by Suniel Shetty, of an indigent villager trying to eke out an earning out of odd jobs is almost convincing, except for his gym-toned biceps.
The movie’s final moments preserve the unpredictability, but the pro-development message is not lost on the viewers, even if it is targeted at the city audience. Wonder, how many people in Indian villages will get the chance or make the choice of watching the movie, but the idea seems to be about engaging the middle and upper middle class city-dwellers, who are so influential in government policy making.
In the aftermath of Union Home Minister P Chidambaram’s open admission that he was not able to take appropriate action against Naxal violence for dissenting voices in his party, it is not clear if the film deliberately has taken a dig at the haphazard way the local police and Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) have been playing a cat and mouse game, often resulting in CRPF jawans getting killed in large numbers.
But the extreme Left philosophy of violence, which is quite often misdirected at soft targets, is torn to smithereens. The corporate world has always been at the receiving end of the Left philosophy.
Though the film does not go all out to defend rampant industrial development at the cost of the poor land-owners, the moral of the story that comes out loud is that wealth creation and distribution is the panacea for most societal ills. “Employment for the youth, State support for entrepreneurship and a peaceful lifestyle can wean away poor people from the treachery of Naxalism”, says Vinod Khanna as a Naxalite-turned-entrepreneur. What the movie intends to do knowingly and inadvertently, is to propagate the idea of change, a change in the middle-class thinking.
