Movie Review: Lage Raho Munna Bhai

You will not often find us reviewing Bollywood films on this site, but Lage Raho (roughly, ‘keep on truckin’ Munna buddy) is something of a cultural phenomenon that may even — dare we say it — move the ‘wheel of the Dharma’ just a tink further toward a nonviolent future. Let me explain.

While it is easy to venerate — and ignore — Gandhi all over the world, in India he has always been both an icon and an annoyance since his assassination on January 30, 1948, as he was in a different way when he was leading the country to freedom from an outside power. School children are taught to pedestal him as “the father of the nation,” while Muslims and former outcaste Hindus, in particular, are told many lies about his position on their fate. In fact, Gandhi is the person about whom people anywhere seem to feel they can retail the most fantastic and irresponsible lies — but I digress. The fact that Gandhi is venerated but not followed in the land of his birth, the land he gave his life to liberate, is understandable, but still most unfortunate. It has been very difficult for the younger generation, who never felt the incredible exhilaration of his uplifting campaigns, to take Gandhi seriously because of the hypocricy that surrounds his image.

All right, say the creators of Munnabhai (also Munna Bhai), don’t take him so seriously — but take him. In this delightful but hard-hitting film the pill is coated expertly. For those of you who, like myself, do not follow India’s westernizing film industry, Munna Bhai is part of a comedy series, written by Rajkumar Hirani and produced by Vidhu Vinod Chopra. It is extremely funny, with excellent subtitles and an utterly delightful plot. Our hero ‘bro’ Munna, falls in love with a beautiful Mumbhai (former Bombay) radio announcer and the only way he can get her attention is by passing himself off as an expert on Gandhi despite the fact that he — like the vast majority of the film’s real audience — has barely heard of him. The scheme works; but in the course of poring over Gandhi materials in a never-visited archive the spirit of the Mahatma appears to him and for the rest of the film uses Munna as his mouthpiece to demonstrate how, time and again, in one situation after another, his (Gandhi’s) advice works. In the last poignant scene, as a photo-op-happy crony of Munnabhai’s poses with the Mahatma, not realizing that the latter is invisible to all but himself, Gandhi turns to the camera and says strongly but wistfully, “You can have my picture — or my principles.”

As Prof. Stanley Wolpert has written in his recent history of the horrific last days of the Raj, Shameful Flight, Gandhi was the wisest human being of his century, and at the end virtually no one followed him. This is the medicine inside the pill; for India, for all of us.

The award-winning film has been shown, to laughter and tears, at the UN and has even led to the introduction of an anti-corruption bill in India. Munnabhai is, as my fellow meditators say, a “sadhana friendly” film (i.e,, it won’t hurt your spiritual practice), with no explicit sex and no violence outside of a slapsticky episode that is more hilarious than disturbing. Many of the Mahatma/Munnabhai interventions are heartwarming — and of course the happy couple, in fact two happy couples, are united.

This is highly recommended entertainment with a core of real inspiration. Probably rentable at an Indian outlet near you, or purchase it from www.indiaplaza.com.