Mahesh speaks on BO success

This is a fact that I had come to terms with way backin time and since then have dropped all pretensions to originality of any kind.The maxim that I live by is that the human brain is a reactor and not acreator. You put something in and something else comes out. Imagesof the icons of the movie world of the bygone days flicker in my consciousness.I recall watching the first day first show of a much-awaited Hollywood film in atheatre as a school boy. To my delight I found filmmakers like Manmohan Desai and many other senior writers and technicians also watching the film.���They���ve come to steal from the American films,���the usher whispered to me. ���You���ll find one of them making thisfilm, or at least sequences from this film somewhere in one of theirs forsure...!��� Plagiarising from Hollywood films is not somethingthat my generation or I introduced to the Hindi cinema. Our predecessors hadmade this into a fine art long before we were born. But they were not lazythieves. Unlike the present computer surfing and DVD generation thieves whosteal shot by shot, our ancestors as well as we, absorbed the material, fleshedit out and served it with the essential local flavour thrown in. My films DilHai ki Manta Nahin and Jism which were sourced from It Happened One Night andDouble Indemnity respectively, are the best examples of how an American seed,when planted into the Indian soil, blooms into an exotic plant similar and yetvery different from the original. But in this globalised age, theIndian film has lost its Indianness. The current generation has spawned a bunchof lazy thieves. Is it because their hearts and minds are not rooted in theIndian ethos? Or has technology made stealing such a convenient experience?Technology however, is a double-edged sword. If it has made stealingeasy, it has made detection easier! Gone are those days when you could goto international film festivals, lift ideas and pass it off as your own work tothe gullible Indian audience. How delighted the critic gets when he catches yoursubterfuge and uses your crookery to show off his own knowledge. Remember howthe deified Black couldn���t bask in its own glory, simply because a criticand a rival art filmmaker spilled the beans about it being sourced from TheMiracle Worker. Let us be honest. We still steal like ourpredecessors did. The only difference is that our hunting ground has expanded.We now have the entire gamut of world cinema at our fingertips to lift from!Don���t believe me? Check out this list then. Judwa ������inspired��� by a Cantonese movie The Twin Dragons Aamir -lifted from Philipino movie CaviteBheja Fry ��� inspired fromFrench film Le Diner de Cons (Dinner with the Idiots) Ugly Aur Pagli��� lifted from My Sassy Girl, a south Korean romanticcomedyMithya ��� inspired by Johny Staccino, which was firstmade in Italian by Roberto BenigniThe maxim for the twenty firstcentury is therefore ���Steal, but don���t get caught.��� Good luck!