When I say disappointment, I mean by Jahnu Barua's standard, and not by Bollywood 'standard', if there is any such thing as standard in Bollywood! Undoubtedly, by the yardsticks of Bollywood, Jahnua Barua's "Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara" is a masterpiece, but....
...by Jahnu Barua's standard, this movie is sub par. Jahnu Barua had won awards in Fribourg, Locarno and other places for his movies, he had been one of the pioneers of serious cinema in Assam (after Dr. Bhabendra Nath Saikia,and also, to some extent, Padum Barua, Deuti Duwara and a handful of others) probably the best known Assamese name to the moviegoers outside Assam (after Bhupen Hazarika and maybe, just maybe, Begum Parbeen Sultana); he showed that someone like Indra Bania, otherwise known only as a comedic actor, could deliver serious performance, he has used the talents of Bishnu Kharghoria, the best Assamese actor of all time (in my subjective opinion), in all his movies, he used theater personalities such as Dulal Roy, and has made many Assamese persons think (and to appreciate serious movies).
Of course, the pitfall of making serious movies in a society plagued by cheap Bombay formula movies is that Jahnua Barua had real problems arranging even Rs. 15 Lakhs (that is, Rs. 1.5 Million, or equivalent of USD 35,000), the minimum amount he needed to make a movie in Assamese. I read this in an interview, where he said that, he would give up making movies in Assamese, as it was too much waste of his time and effort to keep struggling to arrange the money. I also read a letter to the editor by someone in Guwahati, who said that when he arrived to watch a Jahnu Barua movie, the manager of the cinema hall declined to run it, not because he was an idiot, but because even after 30 minutes of the scheduled time, there were only 2 (yes, two!) patrons at the box office!
And as a result, someone as dedicated as Jahnu Barua has to make a movie in Hindi in Bollywood style, where a retired college professor gets to live in a huge mansion (in Bombay, of all places!), and the movie has to end with an absurd courtroom drama!
I do not mean that this is a bad movie; this is not. This movie is yards above the usual Bollywood stuff, 99% of which is stolen from Hollywood (and now also European Cinema: a case in point being Bheja Fry). This movie contains the same sincerity of Barua, that made his movies in Assamese excellent. But this movie does not belong to Jahnu Barua; it was obviously handicapped by the terms of the producers, who made it have some of the tell-tale elements of Bollywood escapism.
So, in a nut-shell, between mutation of the Assamese brain and Bollywood, Jahnu Barua is the casualty.
