The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : A peek into the agrarian crisis

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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

A peek into the agrarian crisis

Young guns: A scene from ‘Summer 2007’

Film: Summer 2007

Cast: Ashutosh Rana, Sikandar Kher, Gul Panag

Director: Sohail Tartari

Our filmmakers are often accused of being mere purveyors of distilled male fantasies. With an eye on the NRI market, they often package Hindi films in a manner that almost mocks at the Hindi-speaking audiences back home. Their themes, lingo, treatment, everything is so urban.

Debutant director Sohail Tartari, however, dares to tread where others have quivered. His “Summer 2007” is on the surface a film about urban youth, five medical professionals who speak the way they do on the campus. But actually, this is a rare, no, rarest Hindi film that talks of the silent agrarian crisis gripping the nation. Farmers’ suicides may not make the headlines with the media drunk on the success of Dhoni’s boys or seeking rising TRPs with the Aarushi murder. But Tartari talks of the Vidharba crisis where many farmers have ended their lives due to their inability to pay an amount many well heeled families spend on an evening out with friends. They may be consigned to single column space or a fleeting mention in the media, but here they occupy centre-stage. Just as well.

There are times where Tartari gets a shade didactic, just as there are times when he adopts a quasi-documentary approach. And the film itself takes a shade too long to focus on the agrarian crisis. For too long, it seems we are watching yet another campus saga with its overgrown boys and girls, doing their political stunts and mouthing innuendos. But those are little foibles one would allow Tartari.

Storyline

He takes a routine campus story – five students of a private medical college who indulge in banter and even enter the poll fray for a lark – but lifts the film heads and shoulders above it with a neat twist. The asides on capitation fee done with, Tatari sends his students to a village as part of a compulsory service. The rich brat pack is not averse to buying their experience certificates either. They might be in a village for service, but of course a short trip to the beaches of Goa cannot hurt! All until they come face-to-face with a ground level depression. It is a world where the moneylender, a mahajan, a sahukar, is king, mai-baap. The MNCs have not reached, nor have the government’s efforts fructified. Little water, no electricity, hardly any means of transport. The farmers are in debt, sometimes due to poor produce, at others, because the system does not allow them to keep much. It is a world where a man mortgages his wife away to the moneylender because he cannot return his loan, and he wants to live. A world where might is all wrong. But who is to complain?

Tartari desists from taking constant pot shots at the system, preferring to develop the story with a smooth narrative content. The vicious circle comes through without too hiccups in the second half though.

And the young guns – Sikandar Kher, Gul Panag, etc acquit themselves with credit. However, it is Ashutosh Rana, as a village doctor who is a scene stealer.

ZIYA US SALAM

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