MISSION KASHMIR

Last week when the film Mission Kashmir’s cast celebrated 20 years of the ‘landmark’ film, a federal investigator raided the charity where the protagonist of the flicker was managed to come out of his PSTD and helped to live a normal life, all happening coincidently after two decades, writes Masood Hussain

- Masood Hussain

Vidhu Vinodh Chopra’s masala film Mission Kashmir celebrated twenty years last week. It was a major Bollywood exercise to harvest the Kashmir tragedy and the media hype led to an exclusive screening of the film for the then President, R K Narayanan and also for L K Advani.

Since all the cinema halls in Kashmir remain locked since 1990, people took their own time in managing to watch the movie. Knowing the limitations of the filmmaker and the expectations of his market, sections of the Kashmir audience did praise Chopra for, at least, attempting to be slightly different from the dream-town mill.

The storyline was slightly different. Mission Kashmir told the story of an orphaned Kashmir boy, played by Hritik Roshan, who grew at the home of a police officer, a role played by Sanjay Dutt. As he grew up, he came to know that the officer, in whom he saw his father-like figure was actually the killer of his father. Driven by the hate and anger to avenge his father’s murder, the boy becomes a militant and eventually ends up destroying Hazratbal and Shankaracharya temple in Srinagar. With Priety Zinta as the lead actress, the story was told with impressive sequences and cinematography.