The original Guru

Mohan Guruswamy Delhi

You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’  George Bernard Shaw in Back to Methuselah (1921)

The new Mani Ratnam movie Guru has been more hyped for the off-screen romance of its two lead actors than for the quality of their work on-screen. Guru begins with a disclaimer that any resemblance to a person, living or dead, is coincidental. That is about the only fiction there is in the movie.

Guru is about the life and times of industrialist Dhirubhai Ambani, which makes it a great theme. Like any Ratnam movie, the music is delectable and the choreography top- class. Aishwarya Rai has never danced better or looked lovelier. But in the title role, Abhishek Bachchan is inadequate and exudes little of the infectious magnetism and charisma of Dhirubhai. Amitabh in Deewar endowed the role of Vijay Verma, loosely fashioned around Haji Mastan, with a larger than life personality. But young Bachchan just does not have enough in him to do justice to Dhirubhai after whom the title role of Gurukant Desai is loosely fashioned.

Mithun Chakravarthy, enacting a Ramnath Goenka patterned antagonist, turns in a performance that is powerful, restrained and dignified, without any of the real-life outbursts of passion and lapsing into scatological expression of the newspaper magnate. For that matter, even Madhavan, as the newsman, essays a role that is a composite of Arun Shourie and S Gurumurthy without resorting to the terrier-like-enthusiasm and willingness-to-please-the-master attitude that was the hallmark of the duo. Contrary to what they professed, the truth had little to do with it.

There is a small episode in passing, which shows a helpless editor in despair as the owner has the front page recast with his foxhounds’ report as the main story. Which is probably what Suman Dubey did while Goenka unleashed Shourie and Gurumurthy at Ambani and anyone else who came in the way, even Rajiv Gandhi.

The role of the Nusli Wadia look-alike is glossed over with a superficially etched characterisation that does not capture the contemptuous arrogance of those born with a silver spoon in their mouths and with which Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s grandson treated the yarn-brokering Dhirubhai. Dhirubhai Ambani once recalled how Wadia would keep him waiting in his reception room for hours before sending him off without meeting him. As Ambani would have it, it was in that reception area that the soon-to-be textiles empire germinated.

But, like most other Mani Ratnam movies, Guru will keep the cash registers ringing loud and long because it takes a great real life story and fictionalises it with dollops of rich masala into a great drama, which only a master craftsman like him can. It's rich fare that comes at a time when India is finally shedding its socialistic innocence and dynamic businessmen are treated as nation-transforming Schumpeterian entrepreneurs, rather than as parasites feeding on a resource-starved economy.

When the history of our recent times is written, the inexorable rise of Dhirubhai Ambani will be one of its more memorable chapters. Because more than the rags-to-riches quality of the Ambani saga, it is a true chronicle of the struggle to transform India from being a laboratory for Lasky inspired social experimentation into an economic powerhouse, set to takes its rightful place in the global political economy.