B’wood’s Holi-stic strategy

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From classic hits like Mother India, Sholay, to latest ones Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani and Raanjhanaa the films that span over 56 years have one common ingredient – a super hit Holi song.
Ever since Bollywood hit its golden age, Holi has featured in many films. But what is even more interesting is a Holi sequence occupying a significant portion of ‘first look trailers’ of the films.
This trend clearly underlines the promotional element Holi offers to lure audience to the movie halls. But is it just the abundance of colours that makes it such a commercial element of the film?
Actor Celina Jaitley doesn’t think so. “Although the festival is all about wonderful colours, Holi celebrations in our films always results into either a dark plot or a turning point. The cheerfulness around is lost due to some gruesome incident. People are so high on emotions that they end-up being a part of some life-changing events,” she says.
The director of Raanjhanaa Anand Rai, however, believes that the splash of bright colours have to be the reason behind this trend becoming so popular. “Although my reason to bring in Holi as a part of my film was script based, I believe that getting colours in the frame might be an attractive idea for the filmmakers. Also maybe since it’s the season of love stories, filmmakers might have taken it in a literal sense,” he says jokingly.
Talking about the Holi sequence in his recent film, he adds, “For me, since Benaras forms a strong character of the film, I had to bring out the real essence of the city. And Benaras is known for so many colours with Holi celebrated as one of the biggest festivals. I just wanted to show the way they celebrate Holi.”
Uma and Gaiti, the choreography duo, believe that Holi brings in a lot of layers and elements like water, colour, bhang, mad dancing etc which makes it fun to work with. “As choreographers, the most interesting part of choreographing a Holi song is that it would, for sure, end up being a wild and fun shoot. Also it would be a constant challenge to make it look drastically different from the previous Holi songs,” says Uma.
Asked what could be done to create an original Holi song, Gaiti replies, “If we look at all Holi songs till date, they are so similar. That’s because the way Holi is celebrated is so specific and it won’t be a Holi song if its essence is not captured.”
“Maybe if we could make the artistes unrecognisable and have a contest for the audience to spot the actors in the song, that could be different,” adds Uma jokingly.