MADHUR BHANDARKAR: AN APPRECIATION POST

By Komal Badve (Team Creative)

Always more interested in movies than studies, celebrated filmmaker Madhur Bhandarkar was very different from the kids his age. While they read books like Tintin, he devoured every possible movie magazine (he would buy them cheap from the ‘raddiwala’), making him quite the hit among his friends since he could fill them in with all the gossip.

By the age of 14, alongside managing academics, he worked at a video library as an errand boy since his father’s business suffered heavy losses. Bhandarkar would deliver cassettes to a variety of people, from bar dancers to filmstars. To support his family, he later dropped out of school and took up various jobs from selling chewing gum at traffic signals to working as an assistant to small-time directors for the salary of a thousand bucks.

His first proper job was that of an assistant director to Ram Gopal Verma on his movie Rangeela (1995) after which he went on to direct his first film Trishakti (1999). Although his first film bombed, his second movie Chandni Bar (2001) was a huge success at the box office.  Critically acclaimed, this film earned him his first National Award, making him a part of the top league of filmmakers in Bollywood.

He then went on to receive National Awards for his movies Page-3 and Traffic Signal. Bhandarkar says he was inspired to make the latter while walking to the Siddhivinayak temple every Tuesday. He would see beggars and eunuchs at the signals and would wonder about their origins and friendships, and found it very intriguing that the red signal meant employment for them.

Known to make some of Bollywood’s most hard-hitting and realistic films, Madhur Bhandarkar’s works touch upon the grim realities from various walks of life. Chandni Bar portrays the gritty life of the Mumbai underworld, along with the vicious world of prostitution. Through Page 3 he exposed the truth about the elitist culture and glamour world in Mumbai.

Movies like Fashion and Heroine not only explore the charm attached to fame but also reveal its darker side, alongside portraying the struggle and hard work that goes into making it large in the fashion and film industry.

  Bhandarkar once said in an interview, “My movies are not exposes, maybe they just hold up a mirror to society. My movies are not judgemental; I just show what happens in our society, sometimes there could be a solution and sometimes there may be none. Life goes on.”