The Hindu : Karnataka News : Actually, it talks of the agrarian crisis

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Karnataka

Karnataka

Actually, it talks of the agrarian crisis

Summer 2007

Cast: Sikandar Kher, Gul Panag, Ashutosh Rana

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 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.

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, Tartari sends his students to a village as part of a compulsory service.

They are not averse to buying its experience certificates either. The students 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 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?

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