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Control V - jayi
Bhava!
Prerequisites for this page:
Fact 1 : Arun Govil played the role of Ram in
Ramanand Sagar's Ramayan.
Fact 2 : Ramanand Sagar also is responsible for a
soap operatic never-ending monstrosity called Krishna.
Most of you (born before the 90s) will remember the original Bad Boys
of the devotional teleserial industry - Ramayan (Sagar)
and Mahabharat
(Chopra?) from the mid-80s. The thing about devotional teleserials is
of course that you need lots of money to generate special effects for
all the miracles and wondrous shit that gods do and people write down
in the form of stories involving these gods. The Chopras spent their
money well and generated one of the most serious mythological wars I
have seen televized. The problem with the Ramayan is that you are
already dealing with monkeys and other non-human creatures, so you want
to be careful it doesn't turn into a comedy. Sadly, in most of the
battle scenes you could see the people in the background just kind of
hanging out and playing with their swords and maces as if they were at
the local Disco Dandia. The songs in Ramayan also pissed me off. What
the hell is with Ramanand Sagar and Ravindra Jain - why can't they
write fewer songs that aren't as long? Get to the fucking point, I know
you are just trying to extend the serial to 54 episodes even though
there really isn't very much in it. The Mahabharat DID have songs, but
only at the end of every episode, and they were less than a minute
long. If they did have extended song/dance sequences during the serial,
it was occasionally that this happened.
Anyway, let me get to the point. Devotional serials have to make sure
they draw the line between what is serious and what is slapstick.
Unfortunately, with the shitty special effects that most teleserials
deal with, and with the sub-standard histrionics that make even the
human characters seem as funny as babboons throwing their shit around,
this is an uphill task. This page is about an example of such
sub-standard special effects, where the SFX people just phoned it in.
Mythology hints at how Krishna was not really muscular and kinda
effeminate (I picture Leo DiCaprio) but that doesn't mean that every
filmmaker has to portray him as such, goddamnit! The manliest Krishna I
have seen was the one from B. R. Chopra's Mahabharat (if
you don't count Vikram Gokhale in that film with Sanjeev Kumar) played
by Nitish Bharadwaj, The Eureka Forbes guy ("Krishna uncle!" hahaha
poor guy still had to
portray a door-to-door salesman after his success from MB), and that's
not saying very much! NTR's Krishna was just horrible. The lipstick...
yuck. I guess wearing blue paint on your body does that gay thing to
you somehow.
Anyway. This is one of the ways the characters in the MB and Ramayan
are connected: at the end of the Lanka war, Jaambvan, the IMMORTAL
friendly neighbourhood bear (also one of the most hilarious-looking
characters from the Sagar serial) asks Ram, "Will I ever see you
again?" and Ram says, "Yeah, you bet your immortal ass, you will"...
and it is meant to imply that he will see Ram in another form or
avatar. So Jaambvan says, "But how will I know it is you?" and Ram
smiles and replies, "You will know.."
And it so happens that during Krishnavtar, Krishna and Jaambvan meet
and they wrestle (remember, Balram was a good wrestler and so was
Jaambvan) and even though Jaambvan kicks ass, he loses to this
effeminate ladies' man, and it is then that he realizes: This is none
other than Ram in another avatar.
The SFX people working on this particular scene in the Sagar long-drawn
version of Krishna's life really phoned it in. When Krishna defeats
Jaambvan, Jaambvan looks at Krishna... and they play some happy music
in the background... and suddenly he realizes who Krishna is... and all
of a sudden, THEY PASTE ARUN GOVIL'S SMILING FACE ON KRISHNA'S BODY!!!
Didn't even get him to stand in for the shot, just pasted his face on
the guy playing Krishna!
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