It’s a bird, it’s a plane ... it’s Gajendra Chauhan

Here are some scripts of alleged films made recently by students at the Film and Television Institute of India:

Existential drama

Actor 1: Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more.
Actor 2: It is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/ Signifying nothing.
Actor 1: Who’s responsible for this angst, this despair, this utter meaninglessness? Is it God? The Devil?
Actor 2: It’s Gajendra Chauhan.

Family drama

The story opens with a large extended happy family. The women wear lots of make-up and jewellery and silk sarees and spend their time scheming and plotting. The men spend their time tying very large turbans.

An arch villainess outdoes all the others in sowing misunderstandings. All the men in the family divorce their wives, remarry and then, smitten with remorse, want to remarry their original wives. But the wives have all lost their memories and can’t recognise their ex-husbands and marry other men with bigger turbans. The ex-husbands then bash up the arch-villainess, Gajendri Chauhan.

Art film

A woman is kidnapped, Tarantino-style and driven through a Wong Kar-wai cityscape to a gang fight, a gory blood-soaked ritual. The gang boss is introduced in a delicious Andrei Tarkovsky slow take. An Amitabh Bachchan voiceover tells a poignant tale of love and betrayal. The camera pans on the romance between the boss and the woman, in the style of Gajendra Chauhan in ‘Khuli Khidki’, with the background song ‘He Man O My He Man’ from his masterpiece,‘Jungle Love’.

Science fiction thriller

The USS Enterprise speeds towards a distant galaxy, where a group of colonists has mysteriously disappeared. After many adventures they reach the planet to find a huge bloated blob-like creature groaning with gastritis. It is a flesh-eating monster that has eaten the colonists. They kill the monster, who reveals with its dying breath that it was Gajendra Chauhan who had given it indigestion.

Whodunit

We wanted to do a Hitchcock-style murder mystery, but the censors said Hitchcock is too suggestive a name, so they banned it. We will now never know whether the butler did it, or Gajendra.

Horror

A young girl is possessed by a vengeful spirit. ‘I command thee, Satan, to leave this girl’s body,’ intones the priest, chanting mantras.

Nothing happens. ‘Leave her, Lucifer,’ commands the priest. No luck. The priest then sprinkles holy water and shouts, ‘Name thyself, Evil One.’ The demon roars in pain, croaks out ‘Gajendra’, and flees the girl’s body.

Animated film

After the ‘Minions’ movie, the cute creatures tire of Gru as their ideal villain. They desperately try other options, such as Kim Jong Un,
ISIS boss Baghdadi and Lalit Modi before becoming ardent followers of Gajendra Chauhan.

(Manas Chakravarty is consulting editor, Mint. The views expressed are personal. You can mail the author at manas.c@livemint.com)