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Business News/ Opinion / Blogs/  POLITICAL ANIMALS: Looking back at anger
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POLITICAL ANIMALS: Looking back at anger

The Angry Young Man reappears once more in a movie, in the same garb. How relevant is he to our times?

A still from Apporva Lakhia’s ‘Zanjeer’ which releases this Friday. (A still from Apporva Lakhia’s ‘Zanjeer’ which releases this Friday.)Premium
A still from Apporva Lakhia’s ‘Zanjeer’ which releases this Friday.
(A still from Apporva Lakhia’s ‘Zanjeer’ which releases this Friday.)

The underrated genius Billy Joel composed a song on the Angry Young Man in 1976, three years after Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar midwifed our own Amitabh Bachchan as Vijay in Prakash Mehra’s Zanjeer. Vijay, a police officer, is a vigilante, quite unlike the guy in the song:

“And there’s always a place for the angry young man,

With his fist in the air and his head in the sand.

And he’s never been able to learn from mistakes,

He can’t understand why his heart always breaks.

His honour is pure and his courage as well,

He’s fair and he’s true and he’s boring as hell!

And he’ll go to the grave as an angry old man."

Closer to this boring guy is Alan Sillitoe’s young runner in The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner or even Rod Sterling, known as Hollywood’s Angry Young Man, a radio and TV artiste in 1950s and 1960s America who used the media to rant against censorship, racism and war.

Anger does not disappear, and cultural conversations keep the Angry Young Man alive. He will stay, because even at their worst, cinema and literature have not abandoned the rebel.

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A still from Prakash Mehra’s ‘Zanjeer’ (1973)

Vijay, on the other hand, is a street revolutionary and messiah when not in his khaki uniform. He ridicules the power of the police and befriends the Pathan ganglord of a gambling den.

Anger against the establishment has changed—in India, it is a hopeless kind of anger, more reported and discussed than ever before—but the angry and the victims of anger have remained the same: the woman, the Dalit, the slum dweller. This week, to our volatile box office, insulated from the workings of the sagging economy, the Angry Young Man returns in the remake of the Salim-Javed and Bachchan original with the same name—with Telugu star Ram Charan (the star of the enormously successful Telegu film Magadheera) in the role of Vijay, and Priyanka Chopra in the role that Jaya Bhaduri played of a streetside knife sharpener vaguely reminiscent of Eliza Doolittle.

A still from Tony Richardson’s ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’ (1962)
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A still from Tony Richardson’s ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’ (1962)

Writers Salim and Javed, who invented Hindi cinema’s Angry Young Man, legally claim their ownership over it. Yesterday, the Bombay High Court rejected their plea to stay the release of the film based on their suit against the main producers of the film, the kin of Prakash Mehra. The duo claim they have the copyright over the script, story and dialogues of the 1973 blockbuster and demanded 6 crore as compensation for replication of their creation.

I revisited Zanjeer original recently, and found it to be quite unimaginative—far from, say, Sholay or the outstanding Deewaar, which Salim-Javed would go on to write. Bachchan is raw, just a promise of the explosive Angry Young Man he became. The acting is very theatrical, although characters are distinct. Will the new Zanjeer strike a chord with changing tastes? Scepticism about the movie is only fair because nobody has rewritten or reinvented the Angry Young Man after Salim-Javed. The same messianic hero who takes the law into his own hands, and avenges the injustice to his family and society, appears in our movies over and over again—mostly with disastrous effects.

I mentioned Alan Sillitoe’s young hero at the beginning of the post. Unlike Vijay, he is a passive man. His anger has a muted fatalism—most refreshing and at the same time most frustrating of the angry young men you would know. Recently, I got the slim, under-100 pages edition of The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner, which later became a movie by Tony Richardson—thanks to an erudite colleague, my introduction to Sillitoe’s writing.

The English author from Nottingham is grouped under the Angry Young Men authors of the 1950s. The book is entirely in the voice of Colin, who is from Nottingham, a “layabout" who escapes his dreary life and unhappy family through petty crimes. He is put in the Borstal, the juvenile delinquents home, where the stuffy governor puts him to task. His two talents are running and rebellion, and he is Borstal’s representative in the long distance marathon competition. During his long runs on frosty roads, the boy ruminates and rants about the governor, about “us and them", his dreams and his complete hopelessness about life. The truculent runner runs the big competition, and in an act of extreme defiance, he lets the other runners beat him just as he approaches the finishing line ahead of them. “And I’ll lose that race," he says, “because I’m not a race horse at all, and I’ll let him know it when I’m about to get out—if I don’t sling my hook even before the race. By Christ I will. I’m a human being and I’ve got thoughts and secrets and bloody life inside me that he doesn’t know is there, and he’ll never know what’s there because he is stupid."

He is the Angry Young Man of every generation and every culture—his anger can’t save anyone, and he will or will not win. Just like us, he is in the unpredictable business of life.

Political Animals is a fortnightly blog about the intersection of politics and art

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Published: 04 Sep 2013, 02:03 PM IST
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