Baahubali is demolishing Bollywood's pride: by exposing its temerity to dream big, failure to craft spectacular, big-budget blockbusters.

We don't know how Baahubali will destroy Bhallaldeva in the concluding part of SS Rajamouli's film. What we know is how Baahubali is demolishing Bollywood's pride: by exposing its temerity to dream big, failure to craft spectacular, big-budget blockbusters and the embarrassing inability to come up to the level of Hollywood.

Like the mammoth statue in Rajamouli's film, Baahubali is falling down on many myths around Bollywood. Unfortunately, there is nobody to grasp the rope and break the fall. Since July 10, when Baahubali -- an event, not a mere film, as its fans proclaim -- was released, Bollywood is getting drenched in a waterfall of scorn. 'Shame', 'Learn from South, Beware', 'Wake up', 'Over paid', 'Hyped up'... are some of the words hurled at Bollywood by Twitter bhakts of Baahubali.

Karan Johar has been quick to salute the mother of all entertainers. He has called Rajamouli the "BAAP" of all directors in India. Even Ram Gopal Verma, has audaciously turned the knife, saying other directors may die of envy and, if Rajamouli doesn't make another film in the next few years, there may not be an industry left.

Frankly, it didn't take Baahubali to show up Bollywood for what it is. Bollywood managed to expose itself by botching up several fantasy films, costume dramas and big-budget productions. The last time Bollywood tried making a big-budget film, it turned out, as Shirish Kunder famously said and later regretted, to be a 150-crore firework that fizzled. Even Shah Rukh Khan couldn't infuse life into a video game masquerading as a movie.

Before that, Salman Khan's misadventure Veer bombed at the box office. The film, a migraine-inducing mishmash of Gladiator, Troy, Spartacus, Conan the barbarian authored by Salman -- was so tacky and kitschy that one critic commented if "this film succeeds, we should all be a little concerned" and another found it "impossible to appreciate".

Bollywood's record with costume dramas and mythology is so appalling that even after 100 years of cinema, there isn't a single movie that has memorably captured Indian epics like Mahabharata or Ramayana on the big screen. It has left India's treasure-trove of mythology, folklore and history untouched.

When it has tried, the failure has been embarrassing. From Amitabh Bachchan's Ajooba to his son's Drona, Salman's Suryavanshi to Shah Rukh's Asoka, the Hindi film industry has been a disaster while dealing with mega-budgets films that rely on VFX, innovative and expensive sets mounted on a large canvas. The result has mostly been farcical, verging on the tragi-comical.

Where are the genuine blockbusters, films that make audience dance in the aisles to their music, clap at the thundering dialogue, whistle and throw coins at the entry of the hero and watch with awe at the choreographed action? Films that pass every cinematic test-- praise from critics, adulation from audience, record-breaking earnings at the box-office-- and yet take film-making to a different stratosphere, triggering comparisons with Hollywood?

Writing about Baahubali, the Guardian asks, "the impressive results only set one to wondering why the American studios don’t insist on getting more for their money".

In comparison, Salman's Veer, perhaps the last period film from Bollywood to be reviewed by a foreign critic was derided as 'hokum of the highest order'.

Film-makers south of Mumbai -- Shankar, Rajamouli, Mani Ratnam, AR Murugadoss -- have consistently produced blockbusters that raise the bar several km higher with their imagination, story-telling, VFX, choreography, cinematography, sets and fantastic set-pieces.

Bollywood, meanwhile, remains stuck to formulaic mediocrity in its smug belief that a film starring one of the big stars -- the Khans or Akshay Kumar -- is good enough to guarantee an opening. Unlike directors from the south who believe in meticulously planning details of sets, hunting new locales (Shankar loves to take his viewers to unexplored places like Machu Pichu), exploring new ideas (Rajamouli's Eega had a fly, Shankar's I had a hunchback as the protagonist) and creating something new every time, Bollywood usually relies on the more standard formulae from the south to propagate and preserve the legend of its stars who guarantee an opening.

When actors become the script and the set, films become an ode to their stars, rather than to the director's creativity and imagination. It's something that afflicts the South Indian film industry as well, which has been the source of inspiration for most Bollywood hits in recent times. So even when big money is spent, most of it is burnt on the lead actor, not on the sets or the story. The result is a series of marketing marvels, box-office wonders but creative duds like Bodyguard, Happy New Year, Kick, Son of Sardar --- films that are forgotten after the opening weekend.

While analysing Ra.One, Rediff argued that it failed because the director and its lead actor pulled it in different directions. "The director's vision was to tell his story, and SRK's was to get his 'message' (the goodness of self) across. Somewhere somehow they did not sync with each other. So at the end of the film, SRK's message comes across, but the story flops in the telling."

This usually is the problem with all star-centric films of Bollywood.

There was a time when Bollywood too had director's who dreamt big and believed in delivering a blockbuster every time they conceived a film. At their peak, K Asif (his Mughal e Azam was India's first real epic), Raj Kapoor, Manmohan Desai and Subhash Ghai were from that great species of filmmakers referred to as 'Showmen'. Perhaps, with the help of today's technology and budgets, they might have thought and even been able to create their own Baahubalis.



But, the showmen are all gone. Today, Bollywood either has big stars who do not wish to experiment too much, or directors who want to experiment but do not have the big stars or the big budgets. Bollywood has some great story-tellers like Shoojit Sircar, Anand L Rai, Rajkumar Hirani and Anurag Kashyap; all kings of the multiplex brand cinema.

But none of them has consistently created cinema that appeals equally to those in the front rows, in the recliners of multiplexes and critics across continents; films that are monster hits in single-screens of dehat and big-screens of Delhi. Unlike Rajamouli and Shankar, they are yet to reveal the kind of magic that transforms a film audience into a screaming, clapping, whistling, madding crowd on the verge of hysteria.

Two decades ago, the Mozart of Madras AR Rehman redefined Indian music. A year later, Prabhu Deva taught Bollywood choreographers new twists, turns and dance floor moves. Let us hope Rajamouli would now inspire Bollywood. And his Baahubali is just the beginning of a new era of the big, bold blockbusters in Bollywood.