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This being our campus blog where we would be engaging in dialogue with young ambitious minds such as you, we would expect a post about careers wound’nt we ? Well… Yes but then this post is not about career options in the Hindi Film Industry. It’s not about how you can get admitted to the FTII (Film & Television Institute of India) or the Satyajit Ray Film Institute. This post is also not about whether it is better to do a course in Sound Engineering before doing a course in Editing or is it better to do a course in Acting before taking up Direction. The post is also not about how you could get selected by Ramu (RGV) or Sanjay Leela Bhansali in their next venture !

This post is about starting off a discussion about the growth and change in which ‘careers’ have been dealt with in Hindi Cinema. I have chosen Hindi Cinema for the topic because of late, the Hindi Film Industry hogs all the limelight so I can safely presume the topic will be one of common understanding. The post is not detailed though I could go on with the comparisons and examples. I thought I would only start off a discussion and conversation with this brief one.

 If I look back at my childhood days and days of watching Hindi movies on TV in ‘Eastman Colour’ and try to recall the professions of the protagonists or the heroes I can recollect the following careers exposed- Mill worker, Mine Worker, Policeman, Dacoit, Gangster, Factory Worker, journalist or working in a ‘daftar’. Daftar being the operational term for an office and very often even after the movie ended you would not be clear on what line of business the office was engaged in but you would see a lot of people poring over many a ledger. Then how can we forget those factory strikes for some reason or the other allowing the story to plunge into one of despair and providing opportunity for the rich factory owner to face off with righteous factory worker. This and many more were ‘career’ oriented scenes that remain etched in memory from the 70s and early 80s.

The late 80s saw the birth of the Banker, the Entrepreneur and the righteous & ambitious promotion oriented young man (the angry ones of course being represented by none other than the original angry young man). The 80s saw a development in the technology of film making and scripts underwent a change with foreign locales opening up and well into the 90s, the script opened up to allow us to peek a little more into the work life of the protagonist for the stories or the romance found itself in the offices.

The late 90s and the years up-till now saw the new careers of the heroes emerge. Now you have Heroes as Chefs (take Saif in Salaam Namaste and Amitabh in Chini Kum), Heroes or Heroines as Marketeers (remember Bipasha in Corporate),Heroes as coaches (as in my current favourite Chak De). You still have the Heroes in some business which you cannot identify (remember Aamir Khan in Dil Chahta Hai going off to Australia and handling some business we don’t know about). My friends made a movie called Kadhale En Khadale (in Tamil and not Hindi ) which featured another of my friends as an IT Engineer who also goes for an on-site opportunity ! Times dure have changed, haven’t they ? The film of course did’nt do well but I was among the few who did watch it.

I am sure some of you will say the story does not demand any details on the profession of the heroes for the movie to entertain the viewer but then if we really think about  this can’t we think of a lot of movies where the profession of the main characters interest us? I am sure we can.

What’s more interesting and what interests me about this topic is the fact that our cinema only reflects the prevalent scenario of the time. In the early 70s and 80s a government or public sector job were considered the only options and that was reflected in the ‘careers’ of our own heroes and heroines. But post the dot come era and the invasion of the Internet and opening up of economy you have diverse careers from Event Management to Radio Jockeying to Software to Marketing to being a Chef, the reality of which has only found its way into the cinema we watch. Cinema imitates life rather than the other way round is’nt it ?

Do you remember the weirdest or the most memorable ‘career’ of a main character in Cinema in recent times ? Why don’t you post that in a comment. We would love to read that for sure !