Deconstructing a flashback

This is my reading of the flashback sequence of Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!. A story based on the real life notorious thief famously called SuperChor Bunty – Bunty the thief.

This is Lavinder Singh Lucky . Age 31 years

And this is Lucky aged 15 .

That is how the story of Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! goes into its flashback. What makes it out of the ordinary, is the immense detailing of the characters, dialogues and locations. The time period, although not specified can be deduced by Lucky’s age. It is designed to resemble the late 80s and early 90s in Delhi.

The film opens with Lucky, the protagonist in police custody and about to be presented before the waiting media that is getting increasingly impatient for a tasty news nugget. The accompanying Crime Show on TV called ‘Criminal’ enlists the theft list of Lucky over a period with an estimated value of 7 crore. This immediately raises the curiosity of the audience as to how can a thief be so prolific. It is quite like the Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks starrer Catch Me If You Can, where the character’s reputation precedes his action, which in turn is shown afterwards. While the films are distinctly apart, the narrative technique to create intrigue is the same. Tell the audience – this is what he did and the audience will wonder back – how the hell can a person do such audacious things?

If a film manages that, Bang ! It has the audience interested and ready for the story. A good beginning is crucial.Watch the first 15 minutes here. This includes the opening credits.

The flashback in Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! is more about the evolving character that is Lucky. There is no single event or cause of him becoming a thief. Lucky, being a boy from the lower middle class craves for wealth that his socio-economic status can’t help him achieve that easily, what with his municipal school education. That he knows that English is important is shown in the greeting card sequence where he asks the hockey playing schoolboy about greeting cards and girls’ affinity for it. And that he is terrible at English is shown in the same scene when his friends mock him by asking 'can he speak English'. Lucky being the overtly confident young guy answers “why not” in a thick Punjabi accent.

Lack of an elite education is also not an excuse to become a crook, for Lucky’s elder brother is shown to be honest, hard working and studious. The family is conflicted and disoriented. A demure mother who is unable to even convince her youngest son to gulp down a glass of milk and a loud bossy father, who knows that Lucky is more street smart than himself.Lucky’s inventiveness and smooth talking is both an acquired aspect as also a positive that he polishes and practices daily to be what he is. A suave talker with ample charm that is not completely independent of his crass street lingo and which has its roots in his growing up environment .

Lucky’s attitude is seen in the way he stands in for a word of words with his father or the way he twirls his kada (bracelet) on his fingers. He is an opportunist and a manipulator who tries to butter up his father for a bike and his equally sinister father nods along to the idea to get Lucky into a trance of fulfillment of expectation only to shouted back to reality making him flee the house with his friends to yet another of his shenanigans. Lucky is also aware that a ruffian’s life is not safe. They witness one of his friends being killed for unspecified purposes by a couple of thugs. That is probably the reason why he stuck with Bangali as his partner in petty crimes and minor thefts until he hit the big league.

I found mild inconsistency in the heavily overpriced food rates in New Amar restaurant that Lucky takes the girl to and that the bill amount was different to the amount he told his friends at the garage that he paid at the restaurant. That apart, there is admirable detailing. Where banners show old hand painted film posters and sugar is sold @ Re. 1 /kg, there are Bajaj scooters on the roads and messy illegal electricity wires running over narrow lanes.

In the scene set in Lucky’s house, ‘Street Dancer’, a popular song in the late 80s of composer Bappi Lahiri picturised on Mithun Chakravarty is playing on the tape recorder. The car seating rich school students has the number plate – DIL 1000 and the background track is ‘Tu Raja Ki Raaj Dulaari’. Translated which means ‘ you are the princess and I am the poor pauper of the streets’. That subtly indicates the arousing aspiration of a life of cars, girls and money.

The production and costume designer’s work is worth a mention to bring the authenticity of it.The transition to Lucky’s present is through a series of faded photographs with rounded edges that establishes both the passage of time and the friendship between him and Bangali.

What is appreciable is that Dibakar Banerjee and Urmi Javekar’s screenplay focuses on the claustrophobia that the protagonist Lucky feels in a Delhi ghetto in his growing years. The only way out of it is by getting rich and hence he steals without apology or remorse. He wants to escape his native culture which he finds stifling and regressive by embracing the consumer culture. He is an anti-thesis of a male Punjabi lead. He wants nothing to do with the traditions and functions, but then the same ostentatious parties are where he gets to steal expensive Mercedes cars.

The reason it is such an effective flashback is that it is driven by both circumstances and characters. As for why Lucky was a turbaned Sikh and now has shorter hair... well doesn't a thief need to have guises and be sleighty ? The intelligent audience can figure that out.

When cable came to India

Cable has been in India for more than 2 decades now. What many have forgotten is the arrival of it. When AsiaSat1 was launched in 1990, it was the first privately owned satellite communication network covering all of Asia. Its owners were a consortium led by three firms: the Hong Kong based Hutchinson Whampoa, Britain’s Cable & Wireless and China’s CITIC Technology Corporation. In 1991 Rupert Murdoch backed STAR TV launched a joint venture between Hutchinson Whampoa and its Chairman Li Ka –Shing.

What a lot of people don’t know is that cable was present in India a few years before the 90s too, albeit in a more crude and rudimentary form. Even before the arrival of STAR TV and the other satellite and cable networks, an informal, illegal, and unregulated form of cable network was already operating in India.

Cable had unofficially begun in India in 1984, spreading from tourist hotels to apartment blocks and finally to individual households. Videocassettes players, linked centrally to a cable network, fed the networks based on subscription. The numbers slowly crept upto 3450 such cable networks by mid 1990 .In four major Indian cities Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata- over 330,000 households had been formed ,totalling an audience of 1.6 million. A potentially massive market that hungry salivating capitalists would have dreams about.

In 1991, STAR’s package of four channels initially offered news, sports, MTV and general entertainment ;the target audience being the educated urban , middle-class viewer. Around the same time, the economy was liberalised by then Finance Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh, when he presented the union budget in Feb 1991.This made India a very lucrative, emerging market which resulted in a scramble from leading global media companies like SONY,TNT,ESPN and CNBC to enter the Indian market. Subsequently there was a wave of Western programming that was lapped up by the average Indian viewer, who was starved of content for years because of the sole state broadcaster -Doordarshan.

Quite naturally, with the mention of cable comes to mind the cablewallah. Unlike the west, the satellite television didn’t spread with set boxes but through cable. It was delivered via cables and the local cable guys dealt with the households .Although dish reception is legal with licenses, cable redistribution is technically against the law. By an archaic Indian Telegraph Act of 1885, it is against the law to dig roads and lay cables without permission by the Telecom commission.

To circumvent this, the cable operators simply ran their lines over the streets and through the branches of trees and lampposts. The satellite and cable revolution was realised on the basis of this by-passing of law and the lack of the policing to tackle this flouting helped the setting up of an unorganised band of cable operators ,who simply set up satellite dishes at one end and with a few rudimentary wired network over the locality would beam programs and made easy money.

Add to those cables lines the overhead electricity wires and telephone wires. And now you know why we have such messy network of wires hanging all over the cities in India!

After a few years, the consolidation effect kicked in and the local operators with more financial clout acquired others or made them sub- contractors and expanded their business. This also resulted in investment in better networks and amplifiers for better signals. These cable operators are known as multi system operators (MSO) who started acting as middlemen who took signals from the broadcasters and passed them on to local cable operators. The cable operators interacted with the viewers, collecting payment and installing connections.

What is interesting is that nobody can keep track of the number of subscribers and the MSO’s deliberately underreported the numbers so that the cost can be kept down to the viewers as well as getting them more channels from the broadcasters who sold their channel for a particular fee a month. There was massive under –reporting and one person who saw its potential was Lalit Modi .He however could not rake in much moolah during India’s cable revolution.

In 1993, Modi established Modi Entertainment Networks (MEN), and entered into a joint-venture agreement to broadcast Disney content in India; the next year, MEN agreed to distribute ESPN across the country as part of a 10-year contract worth $975 million. These were the early days of cable television in India, and ESPN, like other foreign channels, needed local partners to collect revenues from the cable operators scattered across the country and he too would under-report massively.

The entire business was very shaky and the stranglehold of the cable guys and MSO’ like INCABLE NET of Hinduja Brothers continued for well over a decade. Remember the CAS system that was supposed to come in 2003/4? It was government’s way of regulating cable. They couldn't .But now, with the advent of individual satellite dishes for each subscriber, the industry is undergoing change again. Corporate players like Airtel digital, Tata Sky and Dish TV, offer the viewer more control of his choices, money and remote.

Note: most of the information was obtained by reading a very good book –New patterns in global television by J. Sinclair and Elizabeth Jacka ; Third picture from top by Vatsala Goel (Mumbai), a rooftop in Mumbai .