India’s Most Wanted: Terror Redefined

The all-too-short teaser of Rajkumar Gupta’s India’s Most Wanted re-aligns the complex dynamics of militancy- terrorism by pinning the violence down to one evil character whom the teaser describes as ‘India’s Osama’.

‘Fear’ enough. So who is he? The teaser is not telling. Gupta rattles off with spiraling urgency statistics about terror attacks in different parts of India.The heady anonymity of being India’s Osama is an interested platform of evil to explore in cinema. The word is Laden with so many Osama bin Ladens. There is America’s Osama, Pakistan’s Osama .

India’s Osama would have to be a mysterious jehadi . In Gupta’s gripping teaser we hear the militant mastermind say the killings he undertakes that he’s only transferring souls from one body to another.

Politicians, and that includes terror kingpins, have their own logic . Heroism during times of terrorism is also defined by a peculiar polemic and askew argument . Here in Rajkumar Gupta’s India’s Most Wanted we see Arjun Kapoor leading a bunch of nondescript selfappointed anti-terror activitieswho we are told have no guns, only guts.

All this sounds like an attempt to convert the reality of terrorism into the ‘reality’ of cinematic terrorism.And no harm in that.As long as the point being made is telling, piercing and probing.

Gupta’s teaser scores on all three counts.

His cinema thrives on an alchemized realism where a socio-political issue is gravitated to the level of an engrossing news report on television without the shrillness.Interestingly the teaser goes to great lengths to hide the terrorist-archvillain’s identity. It is ironical that cinema, by its very nature, favours the damned.