Ironical that for a film that tars Pakistan as the enemy behind every potential danger stalking India, Neeraj Pandey’s Baby has two popular Pakistani actors in key roles. Heartthrob Mikaal Zulfikaar as a young facilitator helping Indian agents and seasoned actor Rasheed Naz as Maulana Mohammed Rehman,the dreaded “mother lode’ of terrorism. While watching the film, one also remembers wistfully films like Nitin Kakkar’s Filmistaan and Kabir Khan’s Kabul Express (2006) that with great emotional restraint and humour showed us that beyond the politics of hate, and bloody borders, people who dream, dance to film songs, want to laugh and live are essentially alike regardless of the labels that define them.
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We have had jingoism on both sides of the border. Our nadir was Anil Sharma’s Gadar where a lone Sikh with an uprooted hand pump took on Pakistan and killed hundreds if not thousands on his way to his watan on a burning train with his wife and kid. Then there was John Mathew Matthan’s 1999 hit Sarfarosh where a nationalist ACP takes on a Pakistani singer called Ghulam Hasaan (hint..hint).
Baby’s Ajay Singh Rajput channels the moralscape of Sarfarosh’s ACP Ajay Singh Rathod unabashedly. Where Sarfarosh put a patriotic muslim (Mukesh Rishi) in the thick of things, here we have Danny Denzongpa’s token Feroz Ali Khan heading the counter-terrorism unit just so you know..the film is NOT against a religion but only the anti-nationalists. Yes, we get it.
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A Wednesday, Pandey’s debut, clear in its intent that the only way to counter terrorism was to blow up terrorists without any legal intervention, also had a muslim cop saving Mumbai from bombs and terror spreading vermin. But the danger was contained to a few terrorists here unlike in Baby, where the narrative takes a clear stand like Bush in the post 9/11 era that those who are not ‘with’ us are ‘against’ us. Like Nikhil Advani’s D-Day (2013), it also imagines a surgical strike against a key terrorist and makes it look as easy as going on a trek, with an occasional heart in the mouth moment. There are many of those in the film, to be fair. Pandey post A Wednesday and Special 26 has perfected the art of crisp narratives where people walk and talk purposefully, think up impossible schemes with technology and sometimes without it and always tread a grey area where right and wrong do not have a clear outlines. Here too Ajay Singh Rajput smashes the jaw of a willing to cooperate witness, uproots his tooth and when asked why, says, “Aadat hai.”
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He also mentions how during Gujarat riots, he protected a muslim family from a trishul waving mob because he is a proud Indian. Yet, the only people plotting trouble in the film are muslims. The naive engineer being brain-washed by a community leader, the agent who switches loyalties, the terrorist (Kay Kay Menon), wasted in a sketchy role) who wants to be given better facilities in the prison because he has killed more people than Kasab. Don’t also miss the Minister saab who is called the, ‘face of change’ and dresses like someone we know as the harbinger of ‘acche din.’
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Unlike Black Friday, where terror was treated as the tragedy of not just those who suffer it but those who inflict it, there is no sociological subtext here. There are just terrorists and those who swat them as members of a crack team called Baby. You have the towering Rana Daggubati, the bewigged Anupam Kher and the spunky Taapsee Pannu aiding Ajay in his mission to find and decimate enemies of the nation. This is a time perhaps when nations torn apart by internal and external violence feel the urge to assert a singular identity and films like American Sniper and Baby are a reflection of the simplistic, gun powered patriotism that treats symptomatic ills but forgets the root causes of divisions. Like the obviously fake bloody make-up you see on Baby’s victims and warriors and Akshay Kumar’s rather jarringly fake moustache, the ideological territory this film inhabits is hurried and ad-hoc. Without the politics,Baby could have been a better film because it is very smartly edited with sequences that entertain.
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The one thing that stands out is Pannu’s action sequence where she beats up a terror suspect to pulp with no help from a male colleague. Kumar with his taciturn face and supreme fitness is perfect for his role and the film will run and one can only hope, not for the wrong reasons.
with The New Indian Express
Reema Moudgil works for The New Indian Express, Bangalore, is the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, an artist, a former RJ and a mother. She dreams of a cottage of her own that opens to a garden and where she can write more books, paint, listen to music and just be