Paris:

With Tom Cruise widely predicted to engage in a death-defying stunt on the roof of the Stade de France, Sunday’s Paris Olympics closing ceremony promises a memorable passing of the five rings flag to Los Angeles.

Two weeks after the unprecedented complexity of the opening ceremony along the River Seine, there are big expectations for the show to wrap up the Games.

The closing ceremony will be a much shorter affair and will take place — in more traditional fashion — at France’s national stadium.

Artistic director Thomas Jolly has revealed it will combine “wonder” with “dystopia”, suggesting some darker elements than the joyful and impertinent tone of the opening ceremony that drew a record audience of more than a billion worldwide.

Offering a sneak peak to journalists recently, Jolly said he saw the Games as a “fragile monument” and wanted to imagine what would happen if they “disappeared and someone was rebuilding them in a distant future”.

One sequence features “travellers from another space-time who arrive on Earth and discover vestiges from the history of the Olympics”, with acrobats restoring the famous five rings of the Games.

It will reportedly feature more than 100 dancers, circus artists and other performers, with the promise of aerial displays, giant sets and spectacular lighting.

Destination Hollywood 

The opening ceremony featured some huge stars including Lady Gaga, Celine Dion and Aya Nakamura, but some big celebrities are also expected Sunday.

Cruise has been at several Olympic events and the most daredevil of Hollywood stars would be a natural connection between Paris and the 2028 Los Angeles Games.

US media have reported that Cruise has been preparing a spectacular stunt to pick up the Olympic flag and transfer it to LA, with video sequences already filmed on both sides of the Atlantic.

There have been no shortage of Hollywood stars in attendance for the Games who might also play a role, including Snoop Dogg, Eva Mendes, Ryan Gosling and Sharon Stone.

There are unconfirmed rumours that Beyonce — a fervent supporter of the US team on social media — may perform.

Two of France’s biggest musical exports — Air and Phoenix — are already lined up to play, according to Le Parisien newspaper.

Organisers will be anxious to avoid a repeat of the controversy sparked by the opening ceremony, which featured drag queens in a sequence that some Christians and conservatives thought mocked the Biblical story of The Last Supper.

Organisers insisted it was a reference to Greek gods> But Jolly and other members of the team have since been victims of social media harassment, triggering police investigations and condemnation from French President Emmanuel Macron.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Writing in the Times Literary Supplement in October 1921, English poet and critic Thomas Stearns Eliot remembered John Donne thus: “Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think, but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.”

Eliot’s assessment of Donne was true of some others too whom Samuel Johnson had in the eighteenth century called the the-extinct “race” of metaphysical poets. Not incidentally, however, the crown of thinking-as-experience is also befitting for Indian poet, lyricist, author, and filmmaker, the Sahitya, Oscar and Jnanpith awardee, Sampooran Singh Kalra, better known by his takhallus (pen name), ‘Gulzar’.

Renowned Indian poet and novelist Padma Sachdev once called Gulzar saab the Pablo Neruda of Urdu poetry. But it would be as precise to call him the John Donne of ‘Indian popular culture’. And I use this composite phrase instead of ‘Hindi cinema’ or ‘Bollywood’ because a bulk of Gulzar saab’s unexplored philosophical insights far exceed his filmography, poetry, and writings. What is often missed in his language and poetics are his metaphors from quantum mechanics. 

A ‘Phenomenological’ Poet

Born in 1934 in Deena, now in the Jhelum district of present-day Pakistan, Gulzar saab’s early life and his harrowing journey to India before the Partition of 1947 – memories that found lauded expressions in Shyam Benegal’s 1994 classic, Mammo – would make for a fertile backdrop for many a biographer. But not many may pay attention to the cosmic and quantum-like figures of speech that decorate his perceptions of reality. “NASA is my favourite website,” Gulzar once acknowledged. “The universe with its abstract nature attracts me. The abstract element in my poetry comes from there.” 

Watch | Why The Left Is Weak Today In India, According To Gulzar

Had Gulzar saab’s modesty allowed him, instead of calling his poetry “abstract,” he might have called it “phenomenological”. The word ‘phenomenology’ means the study of experience, along with studying the nuances ‘qualia’, that is, the way fundamental units of reality are experienced. Gulzar saab’s poetry often represents reality in minuscule slices. “Qatra qatra milti hai” (“droplets and droplets appear to us”; Ijaazat, 1987), or “jale qatra qatra, gale qatra qatra” (“the kindling of slivers, the melting of slivers”; Saathiya, 2002). 

In certain other cases-as in “main chaand nigal gayi, daiyya re” (“I swallowed the moon, my gosh!”; Omkara, 2006)-Gulzar saab appears to swap the microscopic reality for the cosmic, where swallowing the moon signifies the quest of a mythical oscillatory body, or, in worldly terms, a lover in heat who swallowed the moon to soothe herself.  However, his deeper aesthetic sense resurfaces in moon-related metaphors elsewhere, as in “dhaage tod laao chandni se noor ke” (“pluck slivers of moonlight from the cosmic ray”; Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, 2007). The metaphor reminds one of that famous ‘double slit’ science experiment, where photons split to reveal wave-particle duality. Gulzar saab’s words are nowhere ‘abstract’. In a liminal way, they escort the listener into a scientific world.

Reality, Bite-Sized

This miniaturisation of reality or spacetime has over the last century come to be known to physicists as ‘quantisation’. Neither poets nor quantum mechanics have a monopoly over the art of quantising. However, both enchant us by deconstructing and experiencing reality at a subatomic level. Among physicists and mathematicians who did that with ease and panache, we recall James Maxwell, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, David Bohm, and even modern-day names like Sean Carroll and Jim Al-Khalili. Among psychologists and cultural thinkers, we find Carl Jung and Jiddu Krishnamurti at the helm. And, among poets, Gulzaar saab qualifies as a natural citizen of a sphere that was once dominated by Albert Einstein’s contemporaries, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound (to take a reference from Daniel Albright’s 1997 study, Quantum Poetics).

Also Read | Gulzar On Why He Doesn’t Intend To Return To Films

It is amusing and staggering at once to witness how quantum entities-whether with conscious will or subconscious genius-inform Gulzar saab’s figures of speech. “Ik baar waqt se lamha gira kahin/ wahan daastan mili, lamha kahin nahin” (“once upon a fickle time, a moment dropped somewhere/ there a legend sprouted its wings, and blurred the moment in air”; Gol Maal, 1979). Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle-that is, the limits of human measurements in calculating the momentum and position of subatomic particles simultaneously-is writ large upon this couplet.

Revelling In Uncertainty

This scheme of uncertainty becomes both ambivalent and yet emboldened in “yaar misaal-e-os chale, paayon ke tale firdaus chale/ kabhi daal daal, kabhi paat paat, main hawa pe dhundun uske nishaan/ sar-e-ishq ki chaaon chal/ chhaiyan chhaiyan” (“my beloved trails a dewy guise, as her toes sail aloft paradise/ from branch to branch, from leaf to leaf, I search the wind for her trace/walk in the shade of heavenly love”; Dil Se, 1998). Undoubtedly, these words are addressed to a cosmic being personified as the beloved. The uncertainty about the beloved’s shapeshifting forms reminds one of Biblical, Quranic and Upanishadic figures of speech. But in these words is again embedded that poetical quantisation: the ransacking of woods and the wind to spot and accord a location to a formless beloved. If this were science itself, it would almost be akin to the despair of the observers of the double-slit experiment, struggling to measure quantum entities in waves, particles, or definable units of spacetime.

Also Read | Gulzar on His ‘Scribblings’: I am Not an Artist

Then there are these two couplets: “humne dekhi hai un aankhon ki mahakti khushbu” (“I have seen the wafting fragrance of those eyes”; Khamoshi, 1969), and “apki aankhon me kuchh, mahke huye se raaz hain” (“your eyes are the home of fragrant mysteries”; Ghar, 1978). There are critics who could never understand how “eyes” and “vision” could be compared to the senses of smell and odour. Yet, these lines contain scintillating lessons for those studying the philosophy of quantum mechanics. As Al-Khalili explains in his documentary Secrets of Quantum Physics (2015), the human perception of smell is processed through a “quantum nose”, which interprets molecular oscillations as particles, not waves. Essentially, our “quantum nose” is capable of evoking certain memories through certain odours, which are, in turn, produced by molecular configurations that are of a highly visual nature.

Love, Longing, And Everything Else

The critics who fail to sense Gulzar saab’s brilliance are, in Eliot’s words, like “the ordinary” being whose “experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary”, to whom reading great philosophy and falling in love “have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking”; nevertheless, in “the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes”.  

Another Indian poet, the legendary Rabindranath Tagore, took science very, very seriously. He had once met Einstein to discuss a scheme of galactic union between science and poetry; the West and the East; the human and the divine; the quantum and the cosmic. One such union also appears in Gulzar saab’s famous ghazal, “ruke ruke se qadam, ruk ke baar baar chalen” (“these hesitant feet have again hesitated, and they have walked again”; Mausam, 1975, and Mammo, 1994). There is an unmistakable Upanishadic allegory in the lines that follow: “uthaaye phirte hain ehsaan jism ka jaan par/ chalen jahaan se to ye pairahan utaar ke chalen” (“I have carried the burden of my flesh on my being/ when I leave the world, I’ll take off this garb”). In Mausam, this divide between the garb and the soul symbolises a permanent truth against the backdrop of the separation of lovers. In Mammo, it symbolises the enduring pangs of the Partition. Like logic and love, like waves and particles, the lines distinguish between the ‘garb’, the material aspect, and ‘soul’, the immaterial aspect of human life. One cannot exist without the other. 

Small Things In A Big World

This non-duality is brought to life magnificently in these lines: “aadmi bulbula hai paani ka” (“humanity is a bubble in water”) … “na samundar nigal saka usko/ na tvareekh tod paayi hai/ waqt ki hatheli par behta/ aadmi bulbula hai” (“neither the ocean has engulfed it/ nor has history deconstructed it/ like lines that crisscross the palm of time/ humanity is a bubble in water”). Gulzaar saab refrains from ascribing primacy to the ocean, the origin of life, or to human life itself. Instead, Gulzar, the poet of cosmic and quantum consciousness, is like the microscopists of philosopher G.K. Chesterton, who “study small things and live in a large world”.

Feeling bedazzled, bemused, belittled before Gulzar’s poetical expressions is a sign of us coming to terms with our infinitesimal place in the universe, and understanding it in infinite metaphysical feelings. 

(The author is thankful to Harshita Mishra and Nitin Thakur for their valuable insights.)

(Arup K. Chatterjee is Professor of English, O.P. Jindal Global University)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author

What is common to Aavesham, Premalu, Manjummel Boys, Aadujeevitham, Bramayugam, Aranmanai4 and Hanu Man? All these South films were made on budgets ranging from Rs 10 to Rs 40 crore and were blockbusters, with some even collecting over Rs 100 crore. Though South does have big star flicks too, small- and medium-budget films have always been part of the industry’s oeuvre. They form its backbone, and they are what many filmmakers strive for. 

Cut to Bollywood, where after a revival of sorts in 2023, the industry is again seeing itself go kaput this year. Big Hindi films like Maidaan, Bade Miyan Chote Miyan and Chandu Champion fizzled at the box office, stunning filmmakers. On the other hand, medium-budget films like Munjya (Rs 30 crore), Article 370 (Rs 20 crore), Madgaon Express (Rs 30 crore) and Srikanth (Rs 45 crore) turned out to be hits.  Karan Johar and Guneet Monga’s recent release, Kill, made at just Rs 25 crore, is also performing very well at the box office, despite the Kalki 2898 AD juggernaut. 

Also Read | Bollywood Needs To Stop Bleeding Producers Dry. South Has Lessons

Even so, the risk appetite for most producers remains intact as they sign on A-listers and make big-budget, lavish (Rs 80 crore and above) films. But is the box office giving them the desired results? Sadly, no.

What The Audience Wants

It’s no secret that the Hindi film industry has been going through a tough time this year. Many producers and corporates have seriously started introspecting on what needs to change.

In a recent interview, producer and director Karan Johar said that with shifting audience tastes and high filmmaking costs due to inflation, the Hindi film industry and filmmakers must stop chasing trends and write fresh stories that are culturally rooted. “Firstly, the audiences’ tastes have become very definitive. They want a certain kind of cinema. And if you (as a maker) want to do a certain number, then your film has to perform at A, B, and C centres. Multiplexes alone will not suffice. Simultaneously, the cost of filmmaking has increased. There has been inflation. There are about 10 viable actors in Hindi cinema, and they are all asking for the sun, moon, and earth. And then your film doesn’t do the numbers. Those movie stars asking for Rs 35 crore are opening to Rs 3.5 crore. How’s that math working? How do you manage all these? Yet, you have to keep making movies and creating content because you also have to feed your organisation. So, there’s a lot of drama, and the syntax of our cinema has not found its feet,” he said in the interview.

Can’t Just Dismiss Spectacle Cinema

Of the 1,000-odd movies that are released in India each year (across various film industries), most are small- and medium-budget ones. Spectacle movies number just around 12. While they are important for the Hindi film industry and contribute a significant portion to the box office each year, smaller films are also needed to provide a continuous flow of content to distributors and keep the business going. Plus, the risks for the producer are much lower – smaller and mid-budget films are known to give major returns on investment. Thus, a producer needs to be strategic not just in terms of the number of films he finances each year, but also the budgets.

While scale may matter, substance does too. Where the South film industries are scoring sixes after sixes is content. Small and mid-budget flicks give more room to filmmakers and writers to experiment and be more creative with new themes, genres and storylines. Content-driven films do bring the audience to theatres, as seen across states in India.

Also Read | Anurag Kashyap On Actors’ Demands, Entourage Cost: “Car Is Sent Three Hours Away To Get A Five-Star Burger”

This phenomenon was new neither to the South film industry nor to Bollywood. But over the past several decades, Hindi film producers slowly started looking the other way as they felt such films weren’t able to draw enough people to theatres. When the Covid-19 pandemic struck, the burst of OTT platforms changed the game altogether in India.

The Economics Of The Film Industry

Director Gauravv Chawla, who’s known for Adhura and Baazaar, says, “Tentpoles will always be present and should be. As an industry, we need those big films. But these are few and far between because of the time and scale it takes to mount them and the risks of getting them just right. What has been heartening this year is the number of medium-budget films that have performed well at the box office. This used to be the case pre-pandemic too. We need to make sure we build on this audience appreciation by creating more films where content is the star, be it comedy, drama, supernatural or romance. The steadier the flow of these films, the better it will be for all – makers, exhibitors, distributors and audiences.”

From a film distributor’s point of view, it can be said that both big films and small films have been doing well at the box office. Akshaye Rathi, a film exhibitor and distributor, says, “I think it’s important for all sorts of movies to be made. As much as Laapataa Ladies and 12th Fail have done well, these are very niche successes in terms of their geographical impact. These are movies that have done well in 15-20 large cities. For the entire exhibition sector of the country to sustain, you need big-ticket films or tentpole blockbusters like Gadar, Animal, Pathaan and Jawan to set the box office on fire across the length and breadth of the country. Only that will allow the exhibition sector of the country to sustain well. Simultaneously, it’s important for mid-segment and small-budget movies to fill the gap and keep the scorecard ticking between the tentpoles.”

A Healthy Mix

Ultimately, filmmakers in the Hindi industry feel that a mix of movies across genres – and across budgets – is what is needed to keep the audience happy. As Rathi puts it, the more the Hindi film industry churns out just large-scale, big-ticket actioners, the more fatigued the audience will get. Badly made films will not help the industry either. “We need all sorts of genres and styles of film-making to coexist so that there’s something in the cinemas at any given point of time for every audience category,” he adds.

The Hollywood in the 2000s had witnessed a similar situation. Studios had been consolidating budgets to make blockbuster films, and consequently, the number of smaller films reduced drastically on studio ledgers. In 2013, predicting the end of this cycle, director Steven Spielberg warned makers of an ‘implosion’. “There’s going to be an implosion where three or four, or maybe even half a dozen mega-budget movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that’s going to change the paradigm,” he said. Hollywood ultimately went through an upheaval at the time. Of late, that cycle has re-emerged after COVID-19 as Hollywood studios bat for big blockbusters and mid-range films are premiered directly on OTT platforms.

The bottom line is that movie theatres can’t survive on blockbusters alone, whether it is Hollywood or Bollywood. Perhaps, it is time for the Hindi film industry to rethink its model.

(The author is a senior entertainment journalist and film critic)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author

Last month saw the release of Kalki 2898AD, and as of July 4, the Prabhas starrer has grossed more than Rs 700 crore at the box office. The success of this Tollywood film has naturally sparked comparisons with the Hindi film industry, with its recent flops coming into sharp relief. The recent Bade Miyan Chote Miyan fiasco only highlighted those concerns. Its box-office failure was followed by allegations from crew members that Pooja Entertainment, the production house backing the film, was yet to pay them their dues. In fact, actor Akshay Kumar reportedly had to step in and ask the company to clear the dues before paying him. 

The churn Bollywood is going through has stirred up a hornet’s nest, with many feeling that there is a serious need for course correction. There is widespread chatter about exorbitant star fees and their entourage costs, and writers, DOPs and other crew members have started speaking up about the extreme disparity in pay structures in the Hindi film industry.

Every Friday counts

While Bollywood stars have for years now been able to charge exorbitant fees, the Covid-19 pandemic set in motion a lot of changes. The Hindi film industry went through deep turmoil, and some say it has still not been able to regain its footing. Only Shah Rukh Khan has managed to deliver blockbusters in the last two years. A slew of big-star Hindi films, like Jayeshbhai Jordaar, Laal Singh Chaddha, Ram Setu, Cirkus, Adipurush, Selfiee, Maidaan and Bade Miyan Chote Miyan, have all flopped at the box office, causing great worry to producers and actors alike.

Back in 2022, ace director S.S. Rajamouli had pointed out that the downfall of Hindi cinema in that year – considered one of the worst periods for Bollywood ever – was because of the high fees of actors and directors. “What happened once corporates started coming into the Hindi film industry and paying high fees to actors, directors and companies, was that the need to ‘I have to succeed at any cost’ has come down a little bit; the hunger [to succeed] has come down a little bit. Here, down South, that was not there. You have to swim or you are going to sink.”

A popular filmmaker from the Southern film industry who wished to remain anonymous reflects on the high star fees and entourage costs. “Remember, every Friday counts. If a star becomes too expensive for a producer to manage and they’re already on tenterhooks and the star pushes it – as long as the star is succeeding and selling tickets on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, they’ll curse under their breath but they’ll keep hiring the star. But the minute the star has two or three flops, they’ll drop him or her like a hot potato and the person becomes invisible. At that point, no one wants to put up with it anymore. Thus, the stars need to strike a balance and know when they’re hiking expenses for a producer beyond limits.”

The Economics Of A Project

However, Pankaj Jaysinh of UFO Moviez India says it’s the producers who have the ultimate say in a project and that stars shouldn’t be blamed for their high fees and costs. “No doubt that big names are expensive, but it’s all economics (demand vs supply). If several movie producers are chasing a star, he or she is going to up their fees, and vice-versa. And it’s not that only movies with stars are hits. There have been content-based movies made in Rs 20-40 crore, like Munjya, Madgaon Express, Teri Baaton Mein Uljha Jiya, which did well. Audiences love good content too and stars don’t matter in this case. There are also experiential films made on Rs 100-300 crore budgets, like Kalki, Fighter and Pathaan. Here, the audience wants to see grandeur and stars. Thus, a producer, depending on his budget, always has the option to go for either of these categories. It’s the producer’s call. I don’t think we can blame stars for their high costs,” he emphasises.

The fact, nonetheless, remains that most Bollywood stars come to sets with their entire entourage (of up to even 20 people at times, including stylists, nutritionists, hairdressers, gym trainers, bouncers, etc), and the producer usually has no issues – sometimes, no choice – in coughing up money. It’s the writers and other crew members who bear the brunt and get short-changed for their work. It’s no secret that screenwriters are some of the most poorly paid members of the Indian film industry. Atika Chohan, who is known for Margarita With a Straw (2014), Chhapaak (2020) and Ulajh (2024), says, “The production budgets leave no room for writers and development, and this is a fact. No one takes risks with new ideas and voices, while everyone bleeds money on actors who bring nothing new to the table but extreme losses. This is one of the biggest contributing factors to the current industry recession and market correction. In Bollywood, actors consider it an insult if they are not pampered like gods. It’s embarrassing.”

A Better Business Model

Perhaps there is another business model that could work. Director Anurag Kashyap recently spoke about how the big Khans of B-Town – Shah Rukh, Salman, and Aamir – don’t charge fees for their films and thus, their movies are easier to produce. “They take backend profits, so their films are never costly,” Kashyap said. 

The South has lessons too. While Bollywood producers are struggling with star fees, entourage costs and the like, the South film industry has shown remarkable cost-sensitivity. Kannada filmmaker Anup Bhandari, who worked recently with superstar Sudeep in Vikrant Rona, says the actors here are very aware. “In the South, especially the Kannada film industry, the actors are far more conscious about not burdening the producers. Their entourage mostly consists of their staff and a few key people. I have also seen actors asking producers to ensure they stay within the budget and some who have gone out of their way to help producers with costs,” says the RangiTaranga director. True, even South has expensive big names, but film trade analysts say that this is justifiable due to their huge market not just across India but internationally as well. 

Post-COVID-19, many in the Hindi film industry, including producers, studio heads, and top executives, are looking for a market correction, beginning with star fees. The unpredictability of the entertainment business coupled with a changing audience that is flooded with options means that quality and fulfilment of expectations are paramount today. 

The need of the hour is a cost-effective and healthy ecosystem.”Compare the Hindi film industry to the business models in Kerala, where actors produce good cinema. Take, for instance, Mammootty’s Kaathal The Core, and every Fahad Faasil film. They are examples of a healthy film economy and a creative ecosystem.”

As one trade analyst pointed out, Bollywood should perhaps take a leaf out of the South film industry to get back on the road to profitability – not just in terms of content but in terms of production costs as well.

(The author is a senior entertainment journalist and film critic)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author