Old wine. Old bottle. New label - Corporate

Success is tricky. It is enthralling at first. Then it haunts you. There is always this need to better it. And there in lies the trap. If you attempt to repeat success with the same formula, you better be sure of all the equations and the calculations that got you there. Or the other option is to take the risk of creating an altogether new potion and hope that it is as potent as the earlier one. The risk involved in both is equally big. But the chances of failure in doing the former are more. As same formula means an audience already familiar with your modus operandi. And in doing so you have created your own Frankenstein. You have to now deal with a universe of vastly different expectations your earlier success fuelled in the minds of this savvy and familiar audience. And this is where Madhur Bhandarkar went wrong in Corporate.

The word politics always unwittingly gets used with another word - dirty. There is nothing new in this. Dirty because there is always an innocent scapegoat while the perpetrators join hands and revel in the end. Hindi cinema has used politics as the text and subtext of many movies for as long as we can remember. And today's corporate world seems to have embraced both the words - dirty and politics as second skin - in the way it works. This is perhaps what inspired Madhur Bhandarkar to use as a plot for his film Corporate. But he lost the original thought somewhere in attempting to gloss up an age old theme of dirty real politics with a corporate world sheen. His calculations went wrong. His equations didn't add up successfully. As the real subject matter of a corporate office was only used as a context and not the microcosm where all the dirty politics happened. The politics that happened was political in its true sense and not corporate.

He didn't do what he did in Page 3 - successfully debunk what lay behind the glamour of the socialites from an objective outsider's perspective. What made Page 3 successful was the various sub plots of different socialites and their reasons for being in the party circuit. These very differing reasons provided the humorous and real life insights that made Page 3 successful. The real agendas of each party-goer were played back beautifully in his/her personal life when each returned home. Page 3 provided that crack in the socialite-veneer that assuaged the voyeur in the masses. And it raised the expectations for the next magnum opus - Corporate. One expected to see the real politics in a corporate world. Not what happens at the state and government level which in any case has been so often flogged. One expected to touch and feel the lives of the corporate executives, their pains and pleasures and the real reasons why they succeeded or failed. As isn’t that what corporate politics is all about?

Instead what we saw was the personal and professional life of only one protagonist - Nishi. She was not a victim for the whole two hours and fifty minutes. The whole time was spent on glamorizing the corporate world and the way it worked. An organization was still portrayed as a clean and fair organization within. Which is not true at all, most of the times. Yes there were the unethical espionage escapades with rival companies. But even a slice of internal rivalries was not touched upon. The microcosm of a corporate unit is portrayed clean till it gets tarnished with the political world outside. And that is where the fundamental flaw is. We don't need to be told how dirty real politics is. It was time the masses were made voyeurs to the real goings-on of the corporate world and its real motivations and vulnerabilities. Not state level political wine in the same old scapegoat bottle with a new label – Corporate! Spare us the routine, please.

Comments

[Ravi Kiran]

Have some mercy on the poor guy la. He is just an entertainer trying to tell a story. No body gets it right every single time. U r vicious! :)