Will Adivi Shesh Do To Nadiadwala’s 2 States What Nadiadwala Did To Kshanam?

Revealed The Sacred Barter Deal ….Tit For Tat, 

 Can you spot the Telugu thriller  Kshanam in its “official”  remake  Baaghi 2? The Hindi version of Kshanam is so far removed  from the original that one wonders why producer Sajid Nadiadwala bothered to buy the remake rights in the first place.

Not that I  wasn’t warned. Even before the shooting of  Baaghi 2 started Nadiadwala told me, “We are just taking the core of the plot and turning it around completely. It won’t be Kshanam when we finish  with it.”

Nadiadwala kept his word.This is certainly not the entity that I saw two years ago . Baaghi 2  is as different from Kshanam as  Madhuri Dixit from JaquelineFernandez, give or take the Ek do teen number. Revisionist versions of original works are permissible, even welcome. Sudhir  Mishra has transformed Saratchandra Chatterjee’s Devdas to an unrecognizable beast in the forthcoming Daas Dev.And if you’ve seen that excellent film Bornila Chatterjee’s The  Hunger you will find it hard to find Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus in it.

But these are  revisionist versions  of  acknowledged classics.What Baaghi 2 does to Kshanam is plunder.The remake goes at  the original with hammers and  tongs, reducing the raging drama of  Kshanam  to a high-decibel desi tadka-boosted take on  Pierre Morrel’s Taken.

But  Adivi Shesh who wrote Kshanam and starred in it, plays it cautiously  when I question him about  Baaghi 2 .As  expected   he claims  he hasn’t seen the remake. But here is why Adivi  must make peace with the  remake.

Adivi who is one  of Telugu cinema’s rising stars, has cut a business deal with Nadiadwala. While  Nadiadwala was given  Hindi remake rights  for Kshanam, AdiviShesh   got the Telugu remake  rights  of Nadiadwala’s production 2 States, a film about a South –North marital alliance.

Says Adivi gleefully, “Kshanam got adapted for Hindi and now 2 States is being adapted in Telugu. It’s Serendipitous . Sajid Saab has accorded us the rights for the official remake of 2 States in Telugu. Shooting kicks off on April 5 and we hope to do a good job adapting it for the Telugu screen.”

Serendiptious? Not at all!  The entire plan was to exchange  the remake rights  between  Sajid Nadiadwala and Adivi Shesh. Hence,as per deal, while Nadiadwala got to do what he likes with Kshanam, now Adivi Shesh can exercise  his own  free will on 2 States.

We hear  the Telugu remake , featuring Adivi Shesh and Shivani Rajashekhar, will be radically opposed to the Hindi original.The love story is no more a Punjabi-Tamil alliance  but  an alliance involving two  South Indian protagonists from  different states, most probably Telugu and  Tamil. The conflicts are also changed and the characters would no longer be  battling the conflicts we saw in Hindi.

So then, are we now entering a new phase in the hoary history of remakes where the original would find it difficult to recognize   the remake?