मोर छंइहा भुंईया

"Excellent entertainment with an important message." That's how Anuj Sharma, the star of the film, sums it up for me. Arguably, the biggest blockbuster of Chhattisgarh, India's newest and predominantly rural province, it lured audiences with its heady mix of high-drama, over-the-top comedy, double-entendres and titillating running-around-trees song & dance numbers. In retrospect, its phenomenal success may be explained in terms of its timing: it was released barely three days before the birth of the new state on November 1, 2000; hence the unprecedented upsurge of regional euphoria, as villagers from all over the state flocked in bullock carts, tractors and buses to crowded cinema halls in cities. This, as some might say, is itself ironic since the film's message, as summed up in the summary above, is remarkably simple: a universal, even moral, call to return to one's rural roots. As one of the characters sings to lyrics penned by the noted poet Lakshman Masturia: "a bird may live on trees and fly but it has to return to the earth for its food". At yet another level, the film's reel-life plot reflects its producer-writer-director Satish Jain's real-life story: after having failed as a screenplay writer in Bollywood, he too returned to Chhattisgarh, and invested everything he had in this film. Given this shortage of funding, most of the 'stars' of the film were first-time actors, most of who actually worked for free. In fact, no one, including those associated with the making of the film, imagined that the film will ever hit the screens (it was rejected by every distributor), let alone be such a huge success. But as history shows, every actor of the film- especially Anuj Sharma, who plays the impish go-getter younger son of the family- has become something of a superstar in his/ her own right with a fan-following that exceeds most of their Bollywood contemporaries!