Returning to India after being away for many years is somewhat disconcerting. I am primarily upset with modernism. Not in an NGO, save-the-village-tea-stall-and-my-uncle’s-ethnic-pottery sort of way but in a, “What happened to Disco Dancing?” sort of way.

Now I don’t mean this in terms the actual death of Disco, which is well documented in films like the aptly titled “Last Days of Disco” or the more star-studded (Mike Meyers, Neve Campbell) less aptly titled (yet culturally specific ) “Studio 54″, which recounted the fate of the ill-fated 70’s New York den of hedonism, sequins and glitter balls.

I mean it in the sense of the birth of, the original rise of, the eminent emergence of, Disco Dancing in Indian cinema.

Now I know that (tragically) nowadays there’s a lot of money in Bollywood and actors don’t have to grow handle-bar moustaches, grab Hema Malini, wear yellow shirts, change in the backs of their own Fiats and have their chauffeur’s stand-in last minute as the “villain’s” crony. What’s worse is that it is legitimate money, corporate money funding all this nonsense transformation - some of these directors have even gone to film school (just unfair!). If that wasn’t sickening, I hear people do dance sequences in-front of The Sydney Opera House or The Buckingham Palace (thanks Ken Livingstone) and that’s not the exception, but the norm. What happened to the days when Ooty was the expensive location and Dubai meant the film was funded by at least 4 gangsters in collaboration? (“My son Zabisco has just returned from Singapore”, remains a famous Amrish Puri show-offy line from the blockbuster Naseeb which also featured an overweight Shatrughna Sinha, later Union Minister of Ports, in a fantastic Russian pirouette dressed as a Cossack). The final nail in the coffin seems to be this growing “intelligent” Indian audience who want “different stories”. Stories now apparently have to have logic and reason, not to mention a sequence of events that make sense. What the fuck is wrong with these people? What is not logical about Dharmendra fighting a giant beast which is apparently the offspring of a union between bear and woman or Shaan (a great film) where Sunil Dutt steps out into the leafy open-air balcony of an evil man’s underwater hideout? Enough is enough, I say. I want my real Bollywood back. I want my old India back.

Bernard Shaw once said that youth is wasted on the young. The young in India today will not appreciate the great Disco era of our cinema, an epoch really, when the producers were gangsters, the heroines were their concubines, the lead actors almost always illiterate and the budgets, meager. Furthermore (thankfully), the “movies” didn’t have to be tied down by silly, old fashioned concepts of plot, character, narrative or logical progression of thought. The costumes were golden (and lit), the dance floors were populated by cooks and cleaners (passed off as back-up disco dancers) and the denouement always involved a disco dancing face-off (imagine John Woo, only fabulous).

There are many movies that had the disco “spirit”, Amitabh-starrers Kaalia, Don and Namak Hallal, all featured a central song and dance number with an essential disco beat and the customary silver outfit (and shoes, naturally) all made out of an odd derivative of gift-wrapping paper. Namak Hallal went as far as an aquarium sequence, certainly the only under-water disco choreography to date. Yaraana, a later classic, was about the rags to riches to rags to moral dilemma to riches rise of a singing sensation although disco is cleverly positioned within the script as the sort of proverbial psycho-social id (Freud meets dapper lyricist Bappi Lahiri), guiding the protagonist’s (again Amitabh) songs.

But the brilliant genius overriding all this was the three seminal disco films- Disco Dancer, Dance Dance and Star. Both Disco Dancer and Dance Dance starred Mithun Chakravarty, a once Calcutta street thug turned actor (an understandable transition) and the latter was a vehicle for once pretty boy, now largely forgotten Kumar Gaurav (who later, in white regalia, would go on to torment us in the Dev Anand classic All Rounder, which had us believe, in its largely green settings, that the Macbeth-ish downfall of a rising cricket hero is always the result of fornication with ham actresses in three star hotel rooms- take that, Kapil Dev!). The great thing about Kumar Gaurav remains his incredible ability to remain expressionless even through the easiest of scripted expressions. Expect him to tell you about his dying mother or blow up a warehouse or, as the case in point, take you through the existential journey of a Star and he will be able to (miraculously) make it look as if he were casually buying Gold Flake minis. Someone in Hollywood must have use for this- a walking dead man- or a human wall- can someone get this article to David Mamet?

Mithun Chakravarty was made of different stuff though (mostly Velcro) and certainly deserves his own paragraph as a proponent, nay harbinger, of this great disco wave. I didn’t know him in his ruffian days and I feel like the loss is entirely mine, as I could have witnessed the birth of The Idea- one that converted him from looking like the third key figure of a suburban Cable TV racket into a mullet sporting contortionist Prince of Disco heaven (while also keeping intact the key characters of his former looks). Please see the accompanying photograph if you harbor doubts.

Both Disco Dancer and Dance Dance had similar story lines, boy starts out poor (in the latter, as the child of street performers (Rajesh Khanna rope walking, juggling child) and after an oddly placed rape of his mother who made the fatal mistake of begging in the bad guy’s lawn, the only bread-earner of a newly orphaned household) and ends up dancing his way (with his sister) to financial success, family security and revenge. If Citibank and John Travolta ever got together, the plot would’ve made a great commercial (minus maybe the revenge).

Disco Dancer, the holy grail of the genre, has been universally proclaimed as the worst film ever made by critics worldwide- a fact that seems to cause a hitherto unknown result- getting critics to agree to an opinion. The movie topped a list of the 1000 worst movies ever made at a film conference on bad movies in Germany some years ago (what will the Germans come up with next?) and it beat out home videos and porn movies which were also in the running among the 1000. This judgment, according to me, is unfair and people who have come to it have no appreciation of how far ahead of its time the movie was or how nuanced the theme remains. Now, I may not be able to tell you why or in what exact area the movie was ahead of its time but that’s unimportant.

The idea of Mr. Chakravarty, an urchin (there’s one in all of us, the writer suggests, subtly), catching the eye of a show producer (Om Puri, in a once-ever dancing role) and repeating his every day itty bitty (but with huge potential) dance routine to financiers that land him on the path of fame and fortune, is a heartfelt character journey not unlike Scarface or The Godfather, albeit with more testicle grabbing and headbands with bulbs on them.

Mr. Puri has gone on to meaninglessly poor cinema like My Son The Fanatic and Michael Winterbottom’s In This World but it is mainly in Disco Dancer that he has the ability to flex his vast range (literally) while showing Mr. Chakravarty some mad moves in a particularly taught background-score free dance-step coaching sequence in a hotel room with just the two of them (“Are you watching me?”, is one of the key pieces of dialogue). The motivational speech with dancing is one of many movement-filled life-lesson moments that populate the sequence of events. The film culminates in an, earlier mentioned, face-off with an evil dancing nemesis (complete with thin moustache and his own flickering headband) in perhaps a third act climax segment that rivals the final battle scenes of Lord Of The Rings for suspense quotients and done without the hundreds of millions Peter Jackson had. In one brilliant bit in the final song war (“I am a Disco Dancer”, Mithun sings with a finality) which our hero of course wins (and gets the girl who wears an outfit vaguely resembling Ar2D2, the idea which I find extremely arousing), the nemesis rolls down grand golden semi-circular steps on stage (don’t ask) and stops occasionally to strike a Hellenic pose while Mr. Chakravarty does the same thing while, in defiance of Newton, rolling up them.

The point I’m trying to get across in not of the quality that these movies represented but of an earlier, more innocent world. A world where it was ok not ask for petty explanations of reason when the extras in Bollywood movies broke out into pesky laughter and admiring gaze while fighting the heroes in the final action sequence (Shaan again) or look for accuracy in every little detail of a horse-riding Shatrughna Sinha, jumping onto a London houseboat sailing in the Thames, in his cowboy outfit (Naseeb again).

We knew these movies were made with no money (and with the little that was there, people stole) in fuck-all environments with rubbish people by rubbish people, and we watched them in fuck-all environments, often being bitten by mosquitoes and vendors, while it stopped many times (torn reels). And we laughed, and loved it.

It was India without cable television, venture capitalists, Infosys, fashion designers and SEZ’s. It was an India with Doordarshan till midnight, power-failures, Indira Gandhi speeches, ration cards and Disco Dancers. Of course countries will progress and change, naturally people will want newer, better things but a country is often a collection of collective memories, existing and absent. Our Disco Dancing days are a former country, which now so far forgotten, may be only remain as a collective memory, and like the suspension of disbelief in the films themselves, the Disco Dancer will only live in us, the believing aging few.