Hello, Review: “Bhagwan Ke Liye Mujhe Chhod Do”
“Hello”
“Hello”
“Hello”
“Entertainment ki sabhi lines abhi vyast hain. Kripya thodi der baad koshish kijiye.”
In the continuing series of scoops that we at PFC have been bringing to you, we present an exclusive interview with God himself. Yes, the antaryami is with us.
PFC: You have never before granted an interview. So, what gives?
God: I thought I will speak to all of you directly without the prejudiced lens of mainstream media. In that sense, I am like Sarah Palin who believes in similar philosophy. This has become necessary because of the way I am being represented in recent Hindi films. A few weeks back I saw myself in God Tussi Great Ho, a film where I agreed with little else except the title. So, you can appreciate my consternation when I heard that there was a film being planned on Chetan Bhagat’s “One Night @ Call Center”. That book and its success were the strongest evidences yet against the notion that man is my greatest creation. Then you had Atul Agnihotri, Sohail Khan, Amrita Arora et al involved in the movie. For God’s sake, it was too much. It was time for me to read out those lines from Pulp Fiction, “And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you”.
PFC: So did you read out those threatening lines to these guys who were making this film ‘Hello’?
God (sighs): Not really, I couldn’t get the copyright from Tarantino to use them.
PFC: But they are originally from the Bible! You are the one who spoke them first.
God: Yeah, but I don’t own the copyright of it. Don’t get me started on US Copyright laws.
PFC: So, what did you do then? How did you seek revenge?
God (chuckles): The next best thing. I allowed them to go ahead and make the movie.
PFC: And you have seen the film today.
God: Yes, the tickets and the bucket of popcorn accounted for my entire per diem on earth.
PFC: And?
God: And, I have lived to tell a tale.
PFC: So, what did you learn from ‘Hello’?
God: A lot many things that even I couldn’t script had I wanted to. Firstly, I think most call centre agents have taken a lot of flak from media about their lifestyles, how their vans ply on Indian roads like messengers of death and how dull their work could be but none of these slights could be worse than having Sohail Khan and Isha Koppikar act as call centre agents. I mean it’s so easy for future parents to dissuade their kids to join this industry by just showing them these two as specimen of this tribe. Also, I always thought Katrina was practicing that strange accent to impress Salman but I have realized now that’s the accent of the Goddess of all Call Centre Agents. Katrina is the patron saint of all Accent Neutralization Trainers. Another thing, I need to check again with my press agent whether I said ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’ or ‘the stupid shall inherit the earth’. It seems like I might have erroneously said the latter. Nothing else could explain the success of that book, this movie or the comments that appear everyday on Rediff.
PFC: Apparently, there’s some random Uncle Sam bashing. Did it hurt seeing such divisions among your flock?
God: I was looking for hidden meanings in those scenes. Firstly, you had a Dubya portrait in the boss’s (Dalip Tahil) cabin. Then, the few calls that the six central characters took were vignettes that so beautifully depicted the domestic issues that an average American faces. Like trying to wash your undergarments in a dish washer. Or putting your socks into the vacuum cleaner. Or trying to use the computer without switching it on. Or trying to put a whole turkey into an oven. Such everyday occurances. When the audience laughed at those scenes, I realized why Indians lap up those mails which speak of 30% of Indians at Microsoft or 40% Indians at NASA. Incidentally, there was an Indian Microsoft employee even in this movie. Strangely, he was shown wearing white suits and chilling around at a pool most of the times. No wonder, Google doesn’t have to try too hard. Though he remained faithful to the software profession and his ilk by not getting the girl eventually. That’s how it has always been for software engineers.
PFC: Anything that you learnt personally from the film?
God: I was brought up believing that I make this world go round. But I learnt that it is the Indian call center agents that actually run the motor of this world. You act smart with them and they will stop taking your calls precisely at the moment when your socks are stuck inside a vacuum cleaner or when you need your undergarments and your coffee mug to be cleaned at the same time. Then you call the call center and you get the Indian agent giving you the proverbial ma-bahen. Where will you be then?
PFC: Did the lives of these agents strike you as particularly interesting? As their creator how do you look at them?
God (sheepishly): When I look at Amrita Arora, I too start believing in miracles. Eesha Koppikkar (I hope I got the poor girl’s name right) is again what you would call a kudrat ka karishma. She is an aspiring model who dreams of being in the fashion week. Due to repeat rejections over the last 3 years, she has taken to wearing atrocious clothes and haunting people at her office. Gul Panag promises her boyfriend, Sharman, that they will make love on the second anniversary of their being together. It’s almost like a Master Services Agreement of being in love. I think there were clauses in there which made all of it subject to Dollar trading at Rs. 43, Cost of Living Adjustment being below 5.5% and P/E ratio at Nifty being 18 or above. Sharman, who assiduously kept track of all these factors till the second anniversary day, then proceeded to show the world how roomy a Tavera can be at the back. Gul, however, backed out at the last moment citing the latest unemployment figures which weren’t in line with the Master Services Agreement. Sharat Saxena is “Military Uncle” whose son and grandson are in America and presumably don’t need him (wait till you buy a vacuum cleaner and get your socks caught in it, you ehsaan-faraamosh). That leaves us with Sohail Khan as Vroom whose left body side is in conflict with his right since, as he explains, he is half derived from his mom and half from his dad who are constantly at loggerheads. There, Sohail ends all debates on Darwinism and Mendel’s theory of genetics. Creationism rules, ha ha!
PFC: So did you actually make that call to these people when their lives were hanging in the balance? How did all this happen?
God: Somewhere in between their shift, these six people wanted to have a drink or two. That was quite enlightening. I guess they had a few beers to get their lives sorted.
PFC: Beer or two. And then you landed up to save them. You aren’t setting a great example here, frankly.
God: What’s wrong with beer? I think it’s mankind’s greatest invention.
PFC: We thought it was the wheel.
God: Wheel is a great invention too. But it doesn’t go as well with pizza.
PFC: Thanks! So you did make that call.
God: Absolutely. I wanted to have an SMS poll and then decide. But I thought that would mean I wouldn’t know if Eesha would end up joining an NGO. So I made that call.
PFC: After many millenniums, we heard God speak again to us human beings. But you sounded like Shiv Khera when you spoke about Aatm Vishwaas (self-confidence) and stuff. Should we buy more of his books?
God: Not really. I think the biggest gyaan that I dispensed with was you human beings shouldn’t be afraid of losing. “Haarna” seekho. Learn to lose. And jo haar ke jeet ta hai, usi ko…
PFC: Baazigar kahte hain. Hey, that’s an SRK and Abbas Mustan dialogue.
God (ahem, hazaar sheepishly): Sorry. But I couldn’t remember anything better at such a short notice. I had to give them some insight. It was a toss up between this line and that Amitabh’s line from Kaalia, “Hum jahan khade ho jaate hain, line wahin se shuru ho jaati hai.” I chose the Baazigar one. Thankfully, these guys didn’t catch it.
PFC: How did Salman let this SRK line pass into his film? How?
God: I think Salman was busy making Chandramukhi, Suryavanshi, Chand Ka Tukda and Sangdil Sanam when Baazigar was released. He wouldn’t know the lines from Baazigar.
PFC: What about the songs?
God: What about them? There were some gravity-defying acrobats in red body suits in one of the songs that made me tad giddy. That’s all.
PFC: Was it a happy ending?
God: I remember long back I had read a story where there were 3 friends. One of them wanted a beautiful wife, the other wanted to have the world’s largest library and the third wanted to own the most precious stones in the world. They prayed for long years and at last I appeared and gifted them some awesome things.
PFC: Like what?
God: To the first guy, I gave a vegetable garden, the second got a toothpick and the third got a Best of Himesh CD.
PFC: That makes no sense at all.
God: Hah! Then you must see how Hello ends.
PFC: Really!! What else?
God: And one other thing I would like to add; it seems becoming a software engineer is the last resort of everyone. Last week it was a kidnapper. This week it’s call center agents.
PFC: So how would you sum it up?
God: It’s an anthropological, psychological, metaphysical comical thriller which brings you closer to me.
PFC: Thanks for your time. Before we leave one last question – this financial crisis engulfing the world is worrying everyone around. What’s the worst that could happen to the world?
God: The worst that can happen? I’ve heard Chetan Bhagat works at the stressed debt desk of Deutsche Bank, Mumbai. I hope he keeps his job through all of this and he keeps extremely busy. This film makes his book look like a classic. I fear he may be enthused write a few more. Another book, another film and I might be tempted to buy the rights of those lines from Tarantino…..
Tags: Aam-taur pe gore bewkoof hote hain, and other gems, Bagula Bhagat, Hello, Hello Bol Ke, How to make a stupid book look great, I say Hello, You say Goodbye
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
I think below is Shatrughna’s line in Kalia not Amitabh’s.
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“Hum jahan khade ho jaate hain, line wahin se shuru ho jaati hai.”
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BTW, nice read!
Lol…did you actually see d movie??!!
Darn, I missed the interview. I wanted to ask GOD – that before did you only listen to us when we swore at you and smacked our head on ‘Ghantiyas’?
I bet GOD missed that all and was desperate to get back into the action somehow..
Sohail and co are nuisance of first order. Every third movie seems to have at least two of them.. Two of them proved to the whole world they are dumbest of first order in JTYJN and one of them goes onto redefine creation. JAI HO!!!
ahahaha..classic!!
BTW, didnt know you didnt like the book..i was in the depression that i was the only one who thought it was stupid and silly..ehehe
BD: I guess you need to see Kaalia one more. I have a feeling you’re confusing this line with the “Teesre baadshah hum hain” line of Shatrughan from Kala Patthar. Different movies…
HG: You can ask all the questions that youhave always wanted to ask Him. Yes, there was a time when I was spoilt sill by AB. So I needed my daily does of “duhaii” from the lead actor before I acted. But these days, I have disappeared from the screen excepting seeing my name on the mobile screen as incoming call.
OM: The book was an insult to basic human intelligence
Om, one more hater of the book here, and i firmly believe Chetan Bhagat is one of the most overrated writers. 6 Point whatever itself was no great shakes for me, and OTCC sucked royally.
And when you have Atul Agnihotri as director, and Sohail Khan, Amrita Arora in the cast, its like rubbing the salt further.
I see a lot of parallels between Chetan Bhagat and Dan Brown. Both are tremendously over-rated authors…and both had their most famous book made into movies…watching The Da Vinci Code was like adopting a death wish…and after reading this review…it looks like Hello’s taking the same route.
My wife (she’s a huge Chetan Bhagat fan) got herself a copy of Bhagat’s latest The Three Biggest Mistakes of my Life…and I said…the three biggest mistakes of your life were…
1. Buying and reading ON@TCC
2. Buying and reading Five Point Someone
3. Buying and reading TTBMOML
And here I was thinking the movie was too insignificant to be reviewed. Anyways, I agree that Bhagat’s ON@TCC was incredibly lame, FPS was still a tad better, it addressed some issues really well, and TTBMOML was bastradization of Bollywood( Although the portrayal of a small town and insecurities of the people are very well done in the first 70-80 pages but, after that book is a strange mixture of Rajnikant’s violence meets Kukunoor’s Iqbal meets Bhagat’s uncontrollable desire for his book to be adapted for the Bollywood(AGAIN!).
We’ve had countless examples of unspeakable things being done to great books while translating on film. This must be the first time where an atrocious book getting a fitting treatment.
I read Chetan Bhagat’s interview somewhere where he was going all out about how everyone suited their roles to a T, as if the cast was chosen to fit the characters. Of course, this book was written with the “Khan”dan in mind, including the extended as well as to-be family. Wish the film had Helen too
you have a voracious appetite for self-destruction. welcome to the s&m club.
Come on, Bhagat doesn’t write literature. He just writes popular masala stuff- almost the novel eulvalent of Archie comics… I don’t think he even merits a comparison to Brown. FPS and ON@TCC (though not as good as FPS) were pretty decent ‘timepass’ reads. T3MOML was really bad though and especially since it ried to tackle a wider canvas and more serious issues in Bhagat’s usual and now terribly cliched format and narrative style- it was pure torture and reading it was one of the biggest mistakes of my life.
Though I never expected Agnihotri to make a decent film, especially with such a casting ‘ouch’, I really have to laud you Subrat for enduring such nightmares @ the theatres to serve us such deliriously entertaining posts. This was hilarious indeed- keep it up, buddy! :D
But I do think the book could have made a nice, breezy and youthful film if filmed intelligently with a good cast.
And I have heard Salman(who plays Bhagat) has done a hip hop kind of a song in the film? Really? And to think of it, Bhagat was slated to play himself(before they roped in Salman). Now, imagine Bhagat’s beer belly swaying to bollywood’s hip hop(courtsey Bosco-Caesar), guys! now THAT is healthy entertainment!
Yes, ‘healthy’ entertainment, quite literally.
@BD : shatrughan did not even feature in Kaalia. do revisit the movie
@The Narcissist: there is a diff between not being able to tanslate a book[a good book] into celluloid and translating a crappy book into celluloid. dan brown’s book was a gr8 read and very intersting, a lot of research went into the book. while chetan bhagat’s book is a cheap-thrills book just to make some quick bucks; appeal to the youth by taking up a cheesy call center story, stuff it with all kinds of cliches, making it absolutely filmy so tat some dim witted guys get sucked into making a movie out of it
the book was bad to begin with and adopting it into movie was a recipe for disaster; and to top it all u had the entire khan-daan backing it…saala-behnoi[salman/sohail & atul agnihotri]
“That leaves us with Sohail Khan as Vroom whose left body side is in conflict with his right since, as he explains, he is half derived from his mom and half from his dad who are constantly at loggerheads. There, Sohail ends all debates on Darwinism and Mendel’s theory of genetics. Creationism rules, ha ha…”
Superb stuff man…it rocked.
LOL! Just the thing for a stupid film like “Hello” …..which I was unfortunate enought to watch..
Honestly, the Ku Klux KHan should be given a collective “pink slip” from Bollywood…… and maybe they can take Katrina with them…
Ah, Subrat there have been so many movies where God has played a character. However this is the first time some one has interviewed him. I’m sure he must have pleased with your wicked sense of humour!
It seems Hello is not going to ring at the box office, though I assumed it would get a good initial. Viewers would see it out of curiosity, if nothing else.
By Monday it’s going to be – Hello! Ticket’s anyone!
Hey all, anyway Drona, Kidnap, Hello aint nothing, wait for the baap of all Deshdrohi, starring Kamal Khan. Even Karzzzzz pales in front of it.
Instead of ON@CC, they could have remaked Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City.
It would definitely interest people to see the reaction and journey of a guy who has left Bombay and has come back to Mumbai.
fantastic professor saab……
had the great misfortune of watching this movie due to some unavoidable circumstances…inspite of a promise to myself of not watching any salman khan movie after partner..
Humble request to GOD..
Please declare BANG BANG as the unforgivable sin. any more of Bang Bang anywhere may lead to mass suicidal….
:-)….
Who is Chetan Bhagat btw?
was strolling thru Crosswords a few weeks back and found a girl in teens telling her momma..
“Momma, look at this Chetan Bhagat’s “three mistakes”.. and there thats one night at call center… my teacher (and friends) told me its one of the best books in Indian literature.. ”
Godly book… Godly film.. God save the world!
Manoj kumar ji, I am ready to see you playing Hanuman ji in Kalyug aur ? agaian and again… Surely more entertaining than this great godly world of Chetan bhagat
For a few years filmakers are seemed to be hell bent on making the craziest crap and every yr no of such films are surpassing the previous , someone should suggest FILMFARE to adjust another award ( already thr are sooooooooooo many ) for the worst movies of the YR and etc.
btw.. DeshDrohi looks “@#@$@$SHIT$##@#$@$@$”(sorry for premonition). i guess there should be vigilance around theaters where it gets release( gosh ! who is the distributer) and catch all those creature who dare to buy tkt of the movie!
hehe
Subrat @6,
Indeed its my mistake. Thanks for reminding.
Great stuff, Subrat. Intelligent as always.
And talking of Hello, the book read a lot snappier. Atul Agnihotri and Chetan Bhagat combined have zero screenplay writing skills.
Also, the songs and music were most atrocious.
Bang Bang Bang
Zamana Bole
Boom Boom Boom
Diwana Dole
What does this mean? What kind of writing is this? Who writes this kind of stuff apart from mentally twisted specimens buggered by aliens?
@Subrat..I thought Jan Gupta’s aliens had lifted off Chetan – Atul combo by Friday evening itself as hell had refused them a place..HIM does not know that as yet..KATRINA at last has a flop to credit and Chetan continues as an I banker, I really fear for some Indian corporates now. I am just off to check with my debt desk to enquire whether he is in touch with a certain you know who!!
@Something to share, was checking indiafm and according to that Kidnap has collected 17+ crores in just one week…? if it continues like this it vl be another super hit from Sanjay. ? ?
only one comment
“Subrat is king”
i think the movie is not so bad.Its a one time watchable movie.. may be i have read ONACC many times thats why i knw each and every character..
Hilarious!
Why couldn’t u be the scriptwriter for this film?!!
I made the same mistake of watching it.
Whilst ‘hum bhagwaan ke pujaari hain’, i found myself looking forward to the car falling and crushing the damn call centre crew!
I am guilty of liking the title sequence though!