Those fascinated by H.G.Wells’ Time machine may spare some time for this movie titled ’’I proud to be Indian’’. Though the title may sound grammatically incorrect, it gets justified after u have watched the movie. Albeit it is a well known fact that one should keep ones brain at an arms length while watching a bollywood movie, in the case of this movie, one has to keep it at, may be, a limbs length.......
The theme of the story seems to date back to some time which is no where close to the period tht most of us wud even remember. It’s our Hero’s solitary fight against racism practised by a group of musclemen in England, called skinheads.
Skinheads are a group of psychologically superior, nefarious, white people without a single hair on their cranium.
They have got a subtle dislike towards the black people sometimes, at times the people of the SAARC nations and most of the times just the Indians. (Even the director/script writer is confused abt this). Our hero (Sohail Khan, I dont remember his on screen name) always referred to as ’’Hindustani ladka’’-Indian boy, arrives in London with his father and put up at his brother’s place. Right from the time of his arrival he is shown to carry fire in his eyes and no sooner does he land at the place he is confronted with the ongoing racism and decides to end it all with 21 punches.
The rest of the movie just contains attrocities carried out by the skinheads towards some Indians and every member of the hero’s family everytime making his blood boil at higher temperatures than the previous. And everytime such an incident happens our hero just walks up to some of the skin heads, delivers a few punches and have them run for their life. This annoys their leader who resolves to have him killed after inciting in him a sense of fear towards them. However the skinheads seem to have forgotten that our hero is not a hollywood hero but a true bollywood one. And this hero of ours doesnt have the usual bollywood weakness with him namely a widow mother and a young spinster sister. Hence he is invincible!
After many such encounters with the topbrass of the skinheads, the hero finally manages to gain victory over the group as well their policy in a typical bollywood style best suiting Sunny Deol.
However that is not all tht this movie contains. There is more to it. It tries to spread a sense of fraternity with our neighbours across the border, a patriotic fervour among the youth (most of the people in the theatre were found to be hooting and whistling throughout the length of the movie for reasons unidentified). There is also a bit of humour.
And last but not the least there is also an unidentified heroine in the movie whose sole purpose is to do lip-syncing with the female playback singer, instill a romantic fervour as against our hero’s patriotic fervour and be responsible for the above mentioned fraternity.