Bollywood’s boogie badshahs

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Now a Mumbai-manufactured movie without a song-‘n’-dance is like Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. Right? Criticise the irrelevant outburst of hippy happy shakes, deride them as “item numbers”, but without them, there’d be no salt or caramel in your tub of popcorn.

True confession: I’ve preserved DVD copies of Dhoom 2 for the outstanding body moves of Hrithik Roshan, Dil Toh Paagal Hai for Le Gayee Le Gayee featuring an uber-lithe Karisma Kapoor, and Devdas for the tornado-like showdown, on the floor, between Madhuri Dixit and Aishwarya Rai. All, sheer Bollywood bliss.
And now Prabhu Deva, at the age of 39, establishes himself as the boogie badshah with ABCD: Any Body Can Dance. Ergo, the scraggly bearded dance wonder is in a one-of-its-kind zone: he’s much wanted as a director after Rowdy Rathore and chances are that he’ll also be inundated with acting offers since ABCD has set the cash counters waltzing. Success spells acceptance. Ironic that, since his first foray as an actor in Bollywood with Rajeev Menon’s bilingual Sapnay — opposite Kajol, no less — tanked calamitously.
Cool. So here’s welcoming Prabhu Deva with the proviso that as a director, he gets more quality conscious. No more Rowdies please. That uttered, for this Sunday I’d like to point out some of Mumbai’s actors who are super-dancers but have elected to underplay this aspect of their skills. The fear is that too much of the dance stuff can lead to typecasting.
For instance, if Govinda didn’t execute his pelvic thrusts in his hare-brained comedies, the audience would be disappointed. No sarkailo khatiya, no sarkailo box-office. And despite his incalculable variety of roles, whether he likes it or not, Mithun Chakraborty will be identified as a disco dancer. Incidentally there have been constant rumours about Disco Dancer 2 with his son Mimoh. That, thankfully, hasn’t materialised yet.
Currently, the super-dancers who are stingy with their dancing skills is led, of course, by Hrithik Roshan. He would rather emote than shake a leg, stepping aside for Katrina Kaif to break into the crowd-pleasing Chikni Chameli in Agneepath. The number could well have included him, but he was obviously aware that it wouldn’t gel with his intense, revenge-seeking characterisation. A winner of dance contests at movietown birthday parties ever since he was a child, dance comes naturally to him as breathing. And lore goes that as an adolescent, when he was diagnosed with a slipped disc, his primal fear was, “Will I ever be able to dance again?”
Shahid Kapur, trained by Shiamak Davar, is one helluva dancer but doesn’t make that his USP. To an extent, he was cast in the shake-rattle-and-roll mould in Chance Pe Dance. Since that tanked, chances are that he must have been relieved. Dance can be a subsidiary skill but not the only one.
And going by the splashy set pieces of Student of the Year, there’s Varun Dhawan, who could out-boogie John Travolta. But categorisation as a “dancing star” would be lethal for a career which has just started rocking. Comedies, high-voltage drama and youth-centric flicks are the way to go, obviously.
Considering his core competence and age, however, Prabhu Deva’s the exclusive dancing storm on the scene today. So before you can say WXYZ, an ABCD — Part 2 must be already in the offing. For once, I’m not complaining.