Folks,
In my last End Game post on Episode 19, I had written: I think Anurag Kashyap is a great fan of the vintage Amitabh Bachchan of the 1970s. and the end game of Yudh is going to be his homage to the AB he adores. Perhaps I too should shed my reservations and join him!.. Who knows, he might even beat Ajju to a pulp on his own, without Rishi's assistance!
I could not have been more correct, just as I could not have been more wrong an episode earlier, when I felt that The one thing they cannot have is the routine 10 minutes of fisticuffs at the end, with the hero getting bashed up for the first three quarters of the time, and the villain for the last quarter. For Amitabh in his heyday, this would have been a piece of cake, but not at nearly 72.
Paisa vasool!!: Well, folks, the end game was full on paisa vasool, or, as they say in Mumbai lingo, chakaas!!
It was played
out almost entirely on the top floor of that suitably half-finished construction site.
The place was more than adequately equipped for
such a traditional filmi climax.
It had the mandatory empty drums, and huge nets
dangling before the openings for
Ajju to land in after being catapulted
thru the air by Yudh. It had a handy
length of rope for Ajju to try to
strangle Yudh with, and stout poles for
bashing (Ajju by Yudh) and throwing (Ajju at Yudh). Finally, it had enough concrete blocks for, firstly, Ajju to
crashland in, and finally, for Yudh to bash
Ajju's ugly mug in good and proper, reducing it to the bloody pulp that
I had wanted so badly to see.
No, I am not bloodthirsty. Ajju deserved this and more.
Now if the above sounds tongue in cheek and frivolous, it is meant to be. But when I start talking of Amitabh Bachchan's Yudh in this episode, I am going to be anything but frivolous. To watch a nearly 72 year old AB do all that he did here was almost unbelievable. Or rather, it was like taking a time machine back 35 years, to the days of Zanjeer, Deewaar & Trishul, and their innumerable successors. The only difference seemed to be that Yudh grits his jaw before each blow, and the Vijay of old used to do all this with insolent effortlessness. But in the interests of versimilitude, this was only to be expected.
Just one minute, but what a minute!: Just take those 59 seconds beginning from where Ajju, a maniacal glare in his eyes, aims his gun straight at Taruni's head. Suddenly, Yudh's head surges up behind him, and he grabs Ajju by the shoulder. He proceeds to bang Ajju's head repeatedly the adjacent pillar, and I was mentally yelling once more, once more!
Next comes the classic AB kick, as Yudh's long left leg catches Ajju between the legs and lifts him clean up. Followed by left handed punches to the chest and stomach, and Ajju is sent flying thru the air. And where does he land? Why, he comes crashing thru a brick wall, exactly as we have seen AB do to the villains in umpteen hit films. I almost stood up and cheered!
Another kick that lifts Ajju bodily into the air. More punches, and when Ajju lands one solid one on the back of his neck, Yudh shakes his head like a fighter recovering from a hard blow, and wades into Ajju again. This time, he gets a body lock on him, and throws him straight into the aforesaid net. The shot of Ajju sailing out into the void, clinging desperately to the net, and then coming back, to be seized by Yudh and thrown thru the air once again, was very well conceived and shot. This time, Ajju crashlands in a pile of concrete blocks, amidst a haze of cement dust, and stays there, though for far too short a while, alas!
It was truly magnificent, what Amitabh Bachchan's Yudh made his aging, ailing body go thru. If ever there was a triumph of mind over matter, this was it.
Still the best! : Then, in the very end, the roar of anger, and the fierce gaze from bloodshot eyes as Yudh hears Taruni, her tenuous grip on the ledge knocked off by the cement brick hurled at her by Ajju, fall straight down into the water.
NB:See how negligence pays off at times😉! If the maintenance chaps had done what they were supposed to do and drained that pit of the rainwater, to keep the mosquitos from breeding there, then Taruni would have broken her back straightaway, Instead, she is now bobbing up and down amidst streams of photogenic bubbles, screaming Dad!!! every 5 seconds on the dot!😉
Yudh has, just before this, been half strangled by Ajju and hurled into another lot of cement blocks, and this after being dragged 40 feet by his legs on a very rough floor. At his age and with his ailment, he should have been out cold. Regardless, such is the effect of Taruni's crash into the water ( Yudh probably knows that she cannot swim) that he jacks himself up and charges at Ajju, a cement block in his left hand. Ajju seems paralysed at the sight of this unexpected apparition, for he stares as if transfixed at the advancing Yudh and does not move at all. Not even when Yudh catches him over the right temple with the cement block and he falls to the ground as if poleaxed.
What followed was exactly what I would, given the chance, have liked to do to Ajju. Yudh pounds his face with the block, again and again and again, with the effort needed for each blow being visibly more than that for the preceding one. Finally, he manages to stand up, leveraging his weight with both hands pressed on the recumbent Ajju's chest.
As Yudh looks away for an instant before racing off to save Taruni, his eyes narrowing and face splotched with blood, mostly his own, there is an expression in his face that reminded me of a lion after a successful kill. It seemed to say I am still the best!
The Joker one last time: Only now he is invisible, because this has to be a solo declamation by Yudh and the Joker cannot be allowed to butt in with his sneering comments.
It was an amazingly convincing performance by AB, of a Yudh oblivious to his surroundings, including the gun-toting Ajju, and seeing only his Nemesis and engaging vigorously with him both physically and verbally.
NB: I wondered if this sudden fit of Yudh's was an inspired one, ie fake, meant to divert Ajju' attention and also clarify everything, to Taruni first and maybe to Ajju as well, which is what he accomplishes anyway. But I think not. It was most likely a real, extreme stress-induced bout of hallucination, for it begins just as Rishi is given a mere 2 minutes to start shooting at the assembly in the Shanti Constructions auditorium.
Faced, out of the blue. with this sudden new avatar of Yudh, Ajju, at first suspicious and trigger happy, is soon all at sea. His face shows total bewilderment, and even as he takes in Taruni's explanations, he no longer knows what to do with this Yudh. He calls his accomplice in the auditorium- the unspeakably vicious nurse, who reminds me of nothing so much as one of the female camp guards at Auschwitz - and postpones the shooting.
Avinash Tiwari, who plays Ajju, was really very effective in this segment, , eyes wide and uncomprehending running his hands thru his hair, bending over double in an agony of indecision before leaping for the phone and postponing the massacre. He was also good in the bit where he challenges Taruni, who insists that her dad cannot hurt anyone, You loved me, right? Tum mujhe kitna jaanti ho? An unanswerable retort, for all that it does not apply where Yudh is concerned.
An irredeemable villain: Overall, his Ajju is very well constructed and played. This is a man whose mind has been warped beyond repair by the massacre in the orphanage. So much so that for the 25 years since he was a ten year old orphan, cowering under the table that fateful day, there has been no room in his psyche for anything but a corrosive thirst for revenge against the man he holds guilty for the loss of his adoptive family. A thirst that has destroyed every vestige of humanity in him. Normally, we would have felt for the tormented little orphan boy and his fixations. But Ajju is so hateful - witness the cold-bloodedness with which he murders Jeet, and the viciousness with which he kicks the unconscious Taruni - that there is no way one can feel any sympathy or empathy for him.
A thoroughly satisfactory villain, in short.
To revert, Ajju even seems to accept Yudh's narrative enough to ask a question about the purchase of the orphanage land by Gautam Dev. As that point too is clarified, Ajju sees all of his carefully constructed structure of hate and revenge, so long nurtured, come crashing about his ears. Does he then do the logical thing, accept that he had been murderously wrong all along, and back off at least from the auditorium massacre he wants to stage?
No. For if he were to do that, it would be negating his whole existence, which has been, for the 25 years since 1989, subsumed in this single point agenda of not just defeating Yudh, but of taking a spectacular revenge on him by destroying both his firm and his son right before his eyes. Remember him sharing" with Yudh his sense of accomplishment about his great day having arrived at last? So he does the very opposite of what one would expect. He calls the nurse and orders that the bloodbath begin at once.
Which is when Yudh lays him out with that stout pole before fleeing with Taruni.
If only he had not left the job half done but had hit Ajju another 4 or 5 times, good and hard! But then that would have violated the Fifth Commandment of film climaxes: The villain shall resurface after the first knockout, preferably when the hero has his back turned towards him😉.
Mind over body: As he struggles to save the drowning Taruni, Yudh is once again shown taming his illness, and the parts of his body that rebel against his brain and want to do their own thing. This time, unlike the case in the car earlier in the day, it is his right side. He falls to the ground and rolls over in a desperate attempt to get his limbs under control. And such is his need to save his daughter, and such is his will power, that he does manage it in the end, and puts his hand out to Taruni who, in the closing shot, just manages to get to it. The End. Not the most satisfactory of endings, for all its spare elegance, but more of that later.
Rishi: the second letdown: On Wednesday, it was Taruni who let us down. On Thursday, it was Rishi. All thru the scene in the auditorium, his face showed nothing of the agony he must have been going thru, faced with such a horrible choice. There was not a flicker of terror in his eyes, and the face looked bland and expressionless almost right thru. He did not even seem to be mulling over any desperate move, and at the end, he was opening the bag as if ready for the massacre.
I was appalled. While it was not set out clearly, the hint was that but for Dabra potting the evil nurse at the nick of time (now he was the real hero at the Shanti Constructions end!) Rishi would have done it, and that was enough to damn him irredeemably in my eyes. Yes, he loves his dad and his sister very much, but how can he even think of killing so many of his innocent employees in cold blood just to save these two? And then there was no surety that Ajju would not kill them anyway, for kicks. But even if not, can Rishi ever again sleep at nights, even in prison, after doing something so horrendous? There are things that one does not do, no matter what the cost, and this was clearly one of those. And Rishi failed me big time.
Taruni: the classic abla naari: She was even worse than in the previous episode. But for informing Ajju that Yudh's strange behaviour, addressing an invisible interlocutor, was a hallucination due to his medical condition, all that Taruni did was to scream, alternately, Ajju, ple...ease!! ( instead of the traditional Bhagwan ke liye unhein chhod do!) , and Dad!! She did this with clockwork precision every 10 seconds, at times 5. 😡
It is mandatory for the heroine in a film climax to hang from some edge over a drop high enough to kill her if she lets go. Taruni obeys this rule scrupulously. She was running out, hand in hand with Yudh, when there was a shot, and she spun around. Now there was no indication that she was anywhere near a drop. But the next instant, lo and behold, there she was, hanging over a 40 foot drop in the best approved style! 😉
And when she finally falls into the water, she does it with as much slo mo panache as Hrithik's Aryan in Dhoom 2!
Pick of the day: Not, strangely enough, a scene of Yudh's, for all his bravura performance. It was rather the scene of Anand, shot in the leg by his autistic son with the automatic gun the nurse had given him, hiding the acute pain he must have been in, and actually laughing at Aditya. Telling the boy that it is a nakli gun as it did not hurt him at all when Aditya shot him with it. Leading the boy on, without seeming to do so, to abandon the gandi gun, and go for the chocolates, as Anand leans back, dizzy with pain, against the sofa back and hugs his wife.
It was the very matter of factness with which Anand handled the potentially deadly crisis that made his performance stand out. It was intensely and unassumingly moving, the depth of his love for his child, and the strength of his sense of responsibility towards him, as also towards his wife.
Questions of the day: 1) How did the 10 year old Ajju get to know what was in the document Yudh picked up at the scene of the carnage in the orphanage? He might have learnt about the pressure from Gautam Dev for the sale from someone else later, but no one else would have known anything about the contents of the document Sanjay Mishra had brought with him to get his father to sign it.
2) How did Nikhil manage to get all those CCTV cameras installed in the Shanti Constructions office, and then link them to the display in the top floor of the unfinished mall building ? Security in Yudh's office building seems to be very tight, so even if Nikhil was not installing new CCTV cameras but only taking the feed from the existing ones, he would have had to smuggle the equipment and himself into the building. It seems a very difficult thing to do.
Loose ends: They are all over the place, thanks to the end having been scripted so abruptly and unsatisfactorily. They could easily have added 3 or 4 episodes - Yashraj's superb Powder had 26 one hours episodes. Then they could have fleshed out many important, unfinished issues: the past of Gauri and Yudh, why did Taruni learn about her dad only recently, the fate of Mona and the Kapil murder case, the future of Rishi and Aruna, about Ranjan, what happened to Inspector Choudhuri, - the list can go on and on.
Most important of all, we need to know if Ajju had indeed committed all the crimes we attribute to MM and if so, how. That could have been easily extracted from Ajju by tickling his vanity; he would have readily boasted about all his "achievements"!
As I have
discussed at some length in my earlier posts, I find the whole idea of Ajju being the MM totally implausible.
MM is the very powerful man behind the enquiry against
Gautam Dev, as described by Jeet, who should know how powerful he needed to be.
Ajju can hardly fit this description! For one thing, getting the Home Minister to do his bidding would have needed huge amounts of money. Where on earth would Ajju have got hold of such sums?
In fact, I am
thinking of starting a thread on this topic of loose ends in Yudh tomorrow or early next week, and I would be
very pleased if all my readers could chip
in with their inputs.
But as for the doubts about how Yudh will prove his innocence, there should be no problem about that. Even assuming that Ajju is dead, there is all that stuff atop that mall building, there is Taruni's eye witness evidence, and at the other end, there is the dead nurse, who will surely have a very murky past, and there is the machine gun that Rishi has not yet touched.
The police will dig into Ajju's past and find a lot of more stuff in his house as well. Taruni and Rishi only scratched the surface. Anand will withdraw his statement, and Nikhil will be found. He will, now that he knows who is the villain who killed Mamta Malik, and also being grateful for his very lucky escape from Ajju's henchmen, tell the truth about all that he was involved with.
So there should be no particular problem for Yudh and Anand.
A perfect "The End": To match with the Shanti Constructions bow to Trishul, they should have had a photo op of the whole of Yudh's biradari posing outside Shanti Constructions- Yudh, Nayantara, Rishi, Taruni, Gauri, the new CEO Anand. Preeti, Aditya, and anyone else eligible!
Shyamala B.Cowsik
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