India Uncut
This blog has moved to its own domain. Please visit IndiaUncut.com for the all-new India
Uncut and bookmark it. The new site has much more content and some new sections, and you can read about them here and here. You can subscribe to full RSS feeds of all the sections from here.
This blogspot site will no longer be updated, except in case of emergencies, if the main site suffers a prolonged outage. Thanks - Amit.
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
Atheist heroes in Indian cinema
In my post on Sarkar I'd mentioned my delight at the scene in which Abhishek Bachchan's character reveals that he does not believe in God. Well, it so happens that the main character in a film being an atheist isn't as unusual as I'd thought. NS Ramnath writes in:
[D]id you know that a good man being an atheist is not uncommon in Tamil movies? It probably has to do with the Dravidian movement, which was atheistic and had a huge influence on Tamil cinema. But then, as Kamal Hassan once said, 'devotional' movies also played a big part in converting many of us here to atheism. (I believe in God myself.)Also, reader Srihari Narasimhan writes in to point out that Ram Gopal Varma himself has had an atheist protagonist in an earlier film: Satya was an atheist in Satya. And Nandan Pandit writes in that Abhishek's father, Amitabh Bachchan, played an atheist in Naastik, but "fell at God's feet" at the end of the film.
