Y.M.I. Yeh Mera India

The experience of watching "Yeh Mera India" is pretty much akin to reading the morning newspaper over a cup of tea. The format is divided like the sections of the newspaper dealing with issues that affect our lives in some way or another. It also depicts the various sections/ strata of the society we are living in. Yes, it should be aptly titled as "N. Chandra Times". The narrative format is similar to "Life in a Metro", with every character linked.

Without giving away too much about the storyline, simply said Day-1 is an insight into the life in metro, Mumbai and Day-2 is redemption, retrospection and hope. There is everything for everyone and perhaps even more.

In terms of performance, everybody is absolutely spot on. There are some heavy-weights and stalwarts in there managing a great ensemble.

N. Chandra the director - he is the same who made Ankush, Tezaab and Narasimha and for reason unknown had middle-age crisis resulting in the "lesser-talked-the-better" movies in between. With "Yeh Mera India" he roars and conquers what he had lost. A word of advice, RGV's the forte is underworld, Madhur Bhandarkar - its documentary-style narrative. You should do what you are good at and make this type of movies as your genre.

An exceptional movie. This one surpasses Rang De Basanti and A Wednesday by several aspects. In the beginning th movie gives you a feeling that its going to be another movie with the protagonist call but the portrayal of characters, the acting, background score, all seemed so well balanced, never felt boring even for a minute. As expected actors like Rajat Kapoor, Aupam Kher, Rajpal Yadav were splendid. The best part of the movie was the way the characters get connected to each other and influence each other's lives. Living up to the expectation of the Indian movie tradition, the movie also provides a "Happy Ending" yet without being forced into a Happy Ending scenario. A great work by the director and all the actors who have chipped in great contributions.

Good to see exceptional movies coming these days that have raised the standards of Indian movie industry, that is no more tied to Songs, forced romance and melodrama to keep the audience glued to their seats but movies that have conviction and substance.

To put it nicely, I have really disliked most of N.Chandra's films and the only thing that attracted me to 'Y.M.I. Yeh Mera India' is the cast. Even the title gave the impression that this was going to be another sensationalist overtly patriotic flick. Yet, with names like Seema Biswas, Parizaad Zorabian, Rajpal Yadav, Rajit Kapur, Sarika, Parvin Dabas etc. how bad could it be? So, 'Y.M.I. Yeh Mera India' is actually so bad that it's funny. The narrative structure attempts to follow that of Paul Haggis's 'Crash'. Even though this film is not a rip-off, it did remind me of Haggis's movie. Thus, there are multiple stories that are all interlinked. It attempts to tackle the theme of prejudice and does a miserable job at it. The forced happy ending is hilarious and not for the 'happy' reason. Every one of these stories are so excessively exaggerated that they feel like a parody. Most of the 'characters' are caricatures. The horrendous voice-over obliged me to press the mute button. Given the poor level of writing, I can imagine how the actors might have struggled with acting or whatever. The tagline states 'Behind Every Bad News... There Is Good News...'. Well, this is just bad news.

Yeh mera India is probably the most underdog film that I have known, to have been released in India. I watch the movie via one of the DVD's given by my friend and I found the movie exceptionally good.

Direction and Screenplay: All credits in story, screenplay and direction go to S. Chandra. He is responsible for such sensible casting and pleasing narration. Parallel stories with such dramatization always come as pleasant experience.

Cinematography: There's not much to say about cinematography. Its drama that has been filmed in bollywood, so some colors go along. It comes as nice experience.

Tone: It falls under A1 category within the range of this type of movies, by the range I mean the movie with various parallel stories.

Music: Music is average

Acting: The life of any drama movie is the acting of actors involved in it. One does mostly get good acting awards for the drama movie in which they have acted. I liked the acting in following order Rajpal Yadav, Sayaji Shinde - Anupam Kher - Atul Kulkarni, Seema Biswas - Veerendra Saxena.

This film explores the life of typical Indians. It shows how one bad day comes and how problems are tackled another day. It shows how we create problems by not taking over the responsibility of our character. N. Chandra has done a great job with character development and handling different characters so beautifully. I was never bored for a moment. Dialogues were great and sensitive issues were handled with great care. Although melodramatic factor seems obvious, but I think truth is stranger than fiction, and in real life, things could seem more melodramatic if we shoot these on cam.

Another story like this was taxi 9211, but this was far better. It touched various issues of human beings and were better handled with logical comments and justification in the end.

I gave it a 9, because I think the movie could have been a little shorter. There was some extra time spent on scene elaboration. However, it was a great movie. Maybe, it won't do much good on box office. But, for me it will be a cult classic.