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 spiralling statistics about terror attacks in different parts of India. The heady anonymity of being India’s Osama is an interesting platform of evil to explore in cinema.

In Gupta’s gripping teaser, we also hear the militant mastermind saying that he isn’t killing people, he is only transferring their 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 group of four men who 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. 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 gravitates to the level of an engrossing news report on television without the shrillness. Interestingly, the teaser goes to great lengths to hide the terrorist-arch villain’s identity. It is ironical that cinema, by its very nature, favours the damned.