Lage Raho Munnaibhai (लगे रहो मुन्नाभाई)(Hindi, 2006)

Consider the situation. You are dead tired, have not had any food and you are dragged to see a movie on a dead old topic like Gandhism. What are the chances that you will like the movie? The correct answer is - 100%, if the movie is Lage Raho Munnabhai.

Munnabhai (Sanjay Dutt) is the local goon who has fallen in love with radio jockey Jhanhvi (Vidya Balan). To impress her, he goes in posing as a Gandhian professor. However, in his endeavor to be convincing, he starts reading up on Mahatma Gandhi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandhi) and starts believing in his ideas. He fancies that Mahatma actually comes and talks to him and shows him the way to do things. Employing the language of man-on-the-street, he connects to people through radio and advises people to solve their problems in a Gandhian way.

The movie is very aptly described in the words of the charachter who plays Gandhi - तुम मुझे तस्वीर बनाके दीवार पे टांग दो या मुझे अपने दिल में बसा लो. (You can either frame my picture to decorate your walls or keep me in your heart and follow my ideals). Somewhere down the line, we have lost the ideals of that great man and have started believing him to be "out-of-context" of the couurent world, forgetting that he was out-of-context even when he started. It was his moral strength and the strength of his ideals that enabled him to modify the context towards his goals.

Lago raho Munnabhai is a comedy of Chaplin's genre. It makes you laugh out loud, it makes you clap at the brilliant individual scenes and dialouges, it makes you completely involved with the impeccable timing of every emotion on the face of every charachter and it touches you to the core to realise that what you are laughing at is finally the apathy of your own actions in your day to day life.

Munnabhai MBBS, the movie to which Lage Raho Munnaibhai is a sequel, was also a good movie. A sort of a decent enough adaptation of Robin William's Patch Adams. Lage Raho Munnaibhai, however, is brilliant. Marking the movie as perhaps the first successful sequel in Bollywood, both Sanjay Dutt and Arshad Warsi surpass themselves in the roles of Munnaibhai and Circuit respectively and we really cannot have enough of them. The rest of the cast of Boman Irani, Diya Mirza and all do a good job. But the movie belongs to the producer, Vidhu Vinod Chopra for having this vision and most of all to Raju Hirani, the director, screenplay and dialogue-writer.

Recommendation - If you have not seen it, Go watch it. If you have seen it already, I don't need to tell you, go watch it again. And then purchase the DVD when it is released. Pirated DVDs are a curse.
Rating - ✔✔✔✔✔