Bell the Copy Cats of Indian Film Industry
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
, Posted by Keerthi Jeyaraj at 5:35 PM
Many of us strongly believe in the funda of copy/paste, hence we wish to extend it's scope beyond our computers into every aspect of our life. In the name of reference we never bother to replicate the originals. This concept is widely adapted in the IT industry in terms of re-usability, since it cut downs the cost and effort. It is also acceptable in the manufacturing industry; Toyota coined “3I principle”, which defines “Imitate, Improve and Innovate”. It justifies a fairly acceptable model of imitating a proven successful model of the past and then tries to improve, which is followed by an innovation. This exception applies only to “Science” but ironically “Art” industry adopts it as an example.
Ever since my school days, I get irritated when listening to copy cat tunes for a very reason that the original composer have done a good job which had already made the song a hit, the latter would have also mimicked the original tunes to best fit into his work, but it doesn’t brings a feel good factor. Movies, Music or any form of art can only be lauded for it’s originality and tuning into a copied version doesn’t bring a wow factor in us. Due to the evolution of the music industry, it has now shelved the cent percent copy principle and moved on to the era of remix, where a composer picks an old hit and adds his stuff to the old tunes and try to present a mixture in a so called better format. This is one such insult that any composer could do it the former who did the original scores and it’s said by Karthik Raja, the elder son of music maestro Illayaraja in one of his recent television interviews. When I saw his interview, nothing else popped into my mind other than the words “Well Said Karthik”… If the latter is trying to prove better than the former, he/she must compose a new and a better tune based on the same raaga than his predecessor and refrain from performing a surgery on a healthy body.
The other form of copy/paste in music industry is importing one’s own tune from his previous albums to his current work. Though it doesn’t have any copy rights violations; it never misses to disappoint the fans of the composer. We’ve already tuned into it and we never want to tap the foot or nod our heads to this repetitive music. After all music is evolved only from “Saptaswaram” and we don’t create anything out of the box than deriving it from the 7 base tunes, hence let’s try to be innovative than being imitating.
Another area where we could see more of copy cat scenarios are in the story and screenplay of the movie. The remake versions, imitating stories and screenplay from other language movies are yet other unhealthy practices. It might look new to a person who hasn’t watched the original version, but it’s a mere waste of money and time to some one who have already watched a similar story and shots in a different languages. No wonder the Indian cinema industry are called Kollywood, Bollywood, Tollywood or some etc woods, as we do copy few of our movies from Hollywood. As actor Kamal Hassan says, we must first eradicate the wood term from our Indian Film industry. Tamil Film Industry must be called as such instead of referring it to Kollywood and so be the Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam film industries. Indian Film and Music Industry outnumbers the copy cats with original composers and film makers, our art industry has got numerous legends, who are more competitive than the western artists and with too many feathers in our caps, we don’t really need to identify ourselves with borrowed terms from the west. Though the world is now campaigning about going green; there is no harm in chopping off these woods from our forest.
A good coincidence of borrowing these woods while writing this article gives me a spell check error and forces me to convert them into Hollywood, rather having the terms Kollywood or Bollywood. I neither see a necessity to convert our Indian Film Industry into Hollywood nor adding these colloquial terms into my MS Word dictionary.
It’s always better to be ourselves rather trying to adapt to a compromising scenario. Let’s explore our own potentiality and reap a better return on investment instead of trying to think of copying an existing work. My school Principal Mrs. Usha Raman always advices us to “Invest your time to study rather preparing a “bit” (a piece of paper in which a student copies the answer) for the exam, since second route would also consume the same amount of time of studying and let’s use it in the direction”… Yes, she is right; there is no short cut for success. Let’s be innovative and improve in our arts, since it’s not science.
there is very interested story about the indian actors which one like among the people.
http://www.stories.pk