Chez Moi

Remaking movies - in other words, lifting the success formula from one language and neatly transferring to another - guarantees instant moolah. Or so the belief goes. This, in my opinion, is the reasoning behind remaking a movie. This concept has been employed time and again to varying degrees of success. One of the most successful remake franchises was that of Munnabhai - its Tamil alter ego Vasoolraja and Telugu counterpart Shankar Dada went on to duplicate Sanju’s antics and laughed all the way to the banks.

In the South, Vijay is one of the popular leading actors who employs this tactic regularly, to varying degrees of success. He buys the Tamil rights to a hit Telugu movie, makes it with self as the leading man and hey presto! another super, duper hit ready!! Gilli was one such hit that proved to be a great buy for him, while Vaseegara was a squid. Now, with the rights to Mahesh Babu’s blockbuster Pokiri in his bag, Vijay can almost smell the success once again.

‘Jeyam’ Ravi is another who follows in the same footsteps. He, too, had good runs with his previous movies M Kumaran S/O Mahalakshmi and Mazhai, the remake of MS Raju’s megahit Varsham. When news of Bommarillu hit Chennai, there was widespread frenzy amongst Vijay and ‘Jeyam’ Ravi, amongst others, to net the Tamil rights and sit back and watch the money come rolling in. But things didn’t go their way, with Prakash Raju coming up trumps. But ‘Jeyam’ Ravi needn’t go home with nothing - after all, he’s starring in last year’s Telugu hit Nuvvostanante Nennoddantana (NVNV), which cleared the table at this year’s Filmfare Awards.

In Something, Something, NVNV’s Tamil version, Ravi plays the role of rich NRI lad Santhosh, the same role that made Siddharth the poster boy of Hyderabad last year. Siddharth owned this role, revelled in it and made it completely his. He was hyperactive, bouncing off the walls, super-cool and full of pizazz. This so contrasted with his mature look in the second half, that it worked really well for him. He, in short, talked the talk and walked the walk and was Santhosh, the super-rich, London-born and bred chap. Ravi, well, didn’t just cut the mustard. Everything about him was a let down.

For starters, he spoke with a marked Tamil accent - strike one against a London-born guy. In the scene where he counted the stars in the sky for Trisha, going ‘1… 2… 3…… 10′, I split my sides, laughing. This Santhosh most certainly did not grow up in London! Every single act of his was an imitation of what Siddharth did in the Telugu version - there was nothing originally Ravi in the whole movie. His antics pained me so much that I had to walk out well before the climax.

Maybe it wasn’t Ravi’s fault - that is the cross all remake heroes have to bear. No matter what a brilliant performance he had managed to come up with, he still would have been compared to the original. Well, I’m loosely calling it original but there’s nothing original about the storyline. It is Maine Pyar Kiya and a whole lot of other romantic stories mashed up and served with some fizz. But what it also is a frame by frame copy of NVNV.

One of the biggest drawbacks that Ravi’s got is his voice - he just doesn’t sound macho enough. There’s this scene in Mazhai where he’s supposed to stand up to the bad guys and make them quake in their boots. But in that mousey voice of his, all he managed to do was make me almost wet myself.

Another huge letdown was Bhagyaraj. While I have never been a fan of his, I wept for Prakash Raj as I saw Bhagyaraj take the role so brilliantly essayed by that great actor and bring it down to such a level. In the Telugu version, Prakash Raj is this silent, stoic businessman, who adores his son whilst suffering his wife’s caustic tongue with some admirably repressed passion. In Something, Something Bhagyaraj, in his trademark verbose style manages to make you wonder how such a character managed to amass millions and earn such a major name for himself in England’s capital town. When he tells his brother-in-law and the BIL’s partner that whilst his wife may appear to be the boss during the day, come night he will take charge, how crass can you get? While Prakash Raj was this suave, sophisticated millionaire, Bhagyaraj comes across as this bumbling, uncouth man in ill-suited finery. The scene where he pontificates about the greatness of komiyam (cow’s wee!) in his quest for water to quench his thirst has to rank in the top three as the most idiotic scenes in the whole film.

Though it was just an old story rehashed, NVNV managed to sustain the audience’s interest due to its treatment and the casting. This is where the Tamil version fails. While Something, Something has successfully managed to remake the Telugu movie frame by frame, remaking the Best Actor award will not prove to be such an easy task!

‘Good morning ma’am, my name is Vandana Narayanan, could I please speak to Ms. so&so please…..’ If I had a penny for every time a Vandana or an Anil or a Kumar called me from a call centre, I would be a very rich woman. There is no escaping these call centres, they have got us covered. Morning, noon, night - they are there to rouse you out of bed, interrupt your tea, crash in on your family dinners, time after time. That was all they were to me, a nuisance.

Sue Turton has changed all that. On Thursday night’s episode of ‘Dispatches: The Data Theft Scandal’, she brought to the fore what we all fear deep down - some faceless person getting their grubby hands on our personal and financial data and using it to their own means. To find out more about this, Sue visits various places and people across the UK and in India. And what she finds out is fascinating - and more than a little scary.

Turton goes to India to try and find out how easy it is to get the confidential data we innocent people give over the phone on a regular basis, to these nameless strangers. To her own surprise, it turns out to be a not-too difficult task. Posing as a businesswoman who is interested in getting the financial details of UK customers, she soon makes contact with a Mr Arora. He turned out to be a fount of information, this Arora, as he shows her page after page of data ‘leads’, detailing a caller’s name, bank account number, bank sort code, credit card number, the CVV security number etc. Turton tries to disguise her shock by enquiring if this isn’t illegal but Arora flatly states ‘not at all’!

Then onto Calcutta, where enterprising Mr Chandak goes one step further and proves the authenticity of his ‘leads’ by playing the voice files of actual telephone conversation between his call centre agent and the unsuspecting caller. All this info for just £8!

In the UK, she talks to a convicted felon who tells how difficult it is to get the data from the call centres. Furthermore, he tells of the number of people who join these call centres with the aim of getting their hands on such data and making money out of them. While in the UK, one has to go via the underworld to get such info, in India, it seems much more easier to lay one’s hands on extremely confidential data.

There are brokers whose ‘job’ is to play the role of middlemen, between the call centres and the buyers, who pay tens of thousands to get hold of these ‘hot leads’. What’s even more shocking is the role played by the technicians, who come into such places to maintain the hardware and walk away with millions of data stored in the pen drives. ‘You wink and it is done’, boasts one such middle man.

Then there are these high-class brokers in Hyderabad, who charge upwards of $50 per lead - why? ‘Cos theirs is fresh and unused!

Sue Turton, over the course of a year, has managed to open a massive can of worms. The repercussions of this investigation will be manifold. Here in the UK, there’s going to be a great deal of panic amongst the public and this would undoubedly be fanned by the media and others disgruntled by the shifting of operations to countries like India and China. Indian government is also going to be under some pressure to put the foreign investors’ minds at rest and assure them of data protection. The great boom in the Indian economy owes a great deal to the call centres, BPOs and other associated industries - which could come down like a house of cards if these companies decide to up sticks and move out, en masse.

Will our government step-up? Will we see a marked decrease in call centre-related crimes? We’ll know soon! Until then, keep safe!