Always say no to drugs. Now after Dum Maaro Dum nix them in the movies as well. Pun absolutely unintended, but DMD was one helluva hash, pilfering ideas from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Alejandra Inarritu’s Amores Perros. And heavens, it didn’t spare Dev Anand’s quaint Hare Rama Hare Krishna either.

Smuggled gold biscuits, heavy-duty families killing one another in battles inspired by the great epics as well as The Godfather, plus lethal weapons arms brandished by terrorists have, obviously, become passe. Ergo, drugs — signified by packets of what look like talcum powder — showed up as the new multiplex menace in town. Bad try.
Besides the beefcake presence of Rana Dagubatti, miscast as a romantic resto-singer, and reducing the ultra-sensuous Deepika Padukone into a limb-flaying windmill, Rohan Sippy’s dum-down enterprise is likely to go up in a purple haze. It crashed at the cash counters, notching up the umpteenth flop for its leading man Abhishek Bachchan. So what’s new?
The topic du jour is actually Bollywood’s take on the drug trade. If you ask me, every snort before the camera hasn’t clicked — right from an oddity titled Naya Nasha (1973). In retrospect, Nanda portrayed an ancestor of sorts to Lindsay Lohan, hooked to loaded ciggies. Result: Nanda’s career went finito, and for various reasons, she has refused to be seen in public since then. Initially identified as a cutie-pie chhoti didi and then a jujube soft heroine, the drug addiction — on screen — was too drastic an image switch.
Dharmendra and Hema Malini gambolled through Charas. But if the 1976 marijuana-be flick made any impact, it was because of its posters rather than its anti-drug-hawking theme. Dharmendra dominated the posters, pointing a gun menacingly at the world at large. Not done during the Emergency. New Delhi’s Information and Broadcasting ministry was piqued. The gun was blacked out from the posters, leaving Dharmendra brandishing a big blotch of gooey tar.
The title Charas was used again, crica 2004, by a Boo-grader toplining Jimmy Sheirgill, advertised cleverly as a ‘joint effort’. Sorry, as it happened viewers didn’t want a puff of the weed.
Okay, so hippies and flower power kids could flaunt chillums occasionally, the way Zeenat Aman did in Hare Rama Hare Krishna (1971). Drugs, Dev Anand trembled, were destroying the youth. Aaah, his intentions were honourable, pretty hip and contemporary, but like it or not, R.D. Burman’s Dum maaro dum anthem echoed on campus hostel premises, already tripping out on the mind-lulling trances of King Crimson and Pink Floyd.
Indeed, whisky goblets and XXX rum bottles have been the more life-threatening factors in the movies. But if Al Pacino could go wild on white snow in Scarface (1983), if Midnight Express (1978) vivify the horror of drug couriering, and if the excellently researched Traffic (2000) could grab Oscars, then why should our filmmakers continue with the boring booze biz? After all, when Hollywood takes a drag, Bollywood gets high.
So Sippy’s Dum Maaro Dum packed in a voice-over about Goa turning into a drug haven controlled by Russian, British, American and domestic gangs operating from the fringes. If this commentary was supported by hard facts and a smidgen of responsbility, then the allegations against Goa, would have been credible. No way, the voice-over merely rankled as a piece of smudgy reporting.
Neither could head nor any sort of tale be made of Vishal Bharadwaj’s Kaminey (2009). Grim-faced gangsters sat around looking doped, while some obscure sort of drug running plot was being executed in and out of dimly-lit multi-star hotels. Quite hallucinatory.
Come to think of it, any talk of drug abuse has been believable only when it has been depicted in the passing. Examples: way back in 1988, Rahuvir Yadav as a streetside lout babbling away in Salaam Bombay to the night sky under the influence of a joint (reminiscent of John Nicholson’s act in Easy Rider but we’ll let that pass), Sanjay Dutt as the mafia boss of Vaastav (1999) snorting coke, and the allusions to the D-stuff in Madhur Bhandarkar’s Fashion (2008).
All said and sniffed, Anurag Kashyap is the only filmmaker who has authentically conveyed the nightmare world of drug abuse, right from his debut film Paanch (2003) — a salute to the stoned spirit of Jim Morrison — which was banned, cleared but remains unreleased. Subsequently, through Dev D (2009) and Gulaal (2009) he opened up the rampant use of drugs in bigtown clubs as well as the pokey beer bars of small towns.
Currently, show business itself is known to be partial to designer drugs. Without naming names, tabloid tattle claim that so-and-so’s wife was spaced-out at a pub, or an X Y Z actor has opted for self-imposed rehabilation. You leave such aberrations to the actors and their wives to sort out for themselves. It’s none of your business. But when a Dum Maaro Dum shows up, there is no option but to say no, no, no...