Yes! The concept of plagiarisation doesn’t seem to carry its weight in the Indian society. I used to get worked up whenever the music director Deva blatantly plagiarises a well known Rock song or another, but most people back home seem to dismiss it. This gives a boost to people continue doing it.

Exactly, Ender - even Rahman has very blatantly plagiarized songs, but his best compositions have been original songs - I don’t understand why they don’t see that.

My favorite plagiarized song is “Han Han Yeh Pyaar Hai” from Dillagi — I knew it sounded really cool and fun and slightly familiar, but it took me nearly a year to place it as the “Oh, how I love you babe” song (an oldie, featured also in 10 things I hate about you).

And the worst ever Tamil movie is Thenali — take a bad US movie (“what about bob”) and make it worse? wow.

But come now, a lot of the movies “heavily inspired by” other movies are ok. “Priyamaanavale” was copied (without any attribution) from a Hindi film (the name of which I forget), but it was so much better in Tamil. Many have the “based on” attribution, like Alai Payuthey, in which they’re based on a book, but changing it to kind of fit in India — are those necessarily bad, or is it just the ones “based on” other movies?

Then again, American movies often lift whole scenes from others without attribution (the Sullivan Anne of Green Gables takes a conversation between Anne and Gilbert about her hiding that she’s trying to publish things, a conversation not in the Anne books, straight from Little Women (book and movie)). And the movies are often loosely or closely based on foreign movies with no more attribution than most Indian movies give (as in, everyone with a knowledge of international film or just who reads the entertainment section of the paper knows what movie it’s a remake of, but it doesn’t show up on the title screen).

And then there’s the fun aspect of Hindi movies that they all have to have about thirty sub-plots. CCCC took, without attribution, the plots of several American movies (most notably Pretty Woman), distilled them down to about five minutes, and ran them in sequence. :nice:

My point, in all this ramble? 1) putting new words to the same tune or a very slightly changed tune is not permissible without attribution (or under the category of parody, which this is not), and taking a story line from somewhere else without any attribution — and with attempts to hide where it’s taken from — should not be acceptable; and 2) there should be no double standard. Andrew Lloyd Webber has written very little original music — in fact, I was surprised when I went to see Bombay Dreams that he actually admitted that Rahman wrote all the music! (I was also surprised at how inane the words to “Ishq bina” sound in English.) You want proof? well, it’s everywhere, if you know music, but for starters you can listen to “girl of the golden west” with “phantom” in mind. He gets away with it just fine; Indians doing the same thing shouldn’t be singled out for punishment because they don’t have as much financial support. American movies also do the same direct scene stealing / entire plot lifting / “Based on”-ing with varying degrees of attribution as Indian movies; as long as the American movies get away with it, why shouldn’t the Indian ones be allowed to? Is it just that the American movies with all of that are generally better movies? (Even that’s debatable — I’m a sucker for musicals in any language, so I lean to the Hindi remakes, and I love such movies with mutilated lifted plots and beautiful music as “Raju Chacha”!)

Adrianne, that song from Dillagi was my favorite too and then I heard the song in “10 things I hate about you” and was totally taken aback. I agree there is definitely some plagiarization in American movies too. As far as Indian movies and music are concerned, they sometimes go nuts like the song from “kadalan”, that had 5 or 6 copies in various movies. Than there is the “Kinna Sona” and “Mera Piya Ghar aaya” songs by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan that had so many copies, it was very aggravating :)

I agree sometimes the Indian touch adds something that will make a plot or tune more enjoyable, but I worry if it ends up stifling originality and creativity.

I would like to recollect an interview from Ram Gopal Verma. He said that there are only “five” original movie themes/storylines in Bollywood. And the rest are all inspired from these five themes in one way or the other. Amazing is’nt it!!!

L.

Interesting, L.

Read this article from Rediff.com
http://www.rediff.com/movies/2003/may/21deepa.htm

Read it yesterday, Ashwini - good one and runs along similar notes too.