Warning: This is going to be a rambling post, and incidentally it is not about Baghban. So you may skip directly to the fourth paragraph and lose out on nothing.
Whenever I hear someone talk about what a sweet, sad and touching film Baghban is, and how it makes parents reflect on their sad, imminent future, it makes me realise how little we Indians demand of our movies. Give us a kind old couple with golden hearts, a bunch of selfish kids who relentlessly mistreat them, a motley bunch of friends who help the old couple pull things together, and watch us wet our hankies. Like in many things, my dislike for Baghban stems not so much from the film itself - I think Hema Malini was looking gorgeous, and the improbability of having a teenaged granddaughter within 40 years of marriage (hastily explained in the opening scenes as a result of both Amitabh and his oldest son having married very early - what the heck?) or a man claiming to have worked 40 years in a bank which was established less than ten years before the film was made - these are all goofs that we have long forgiven Hindi cinema for.
My bias against the film comes from the fact that the story is so time-worn - I’ve seen half-a-dozen films in the Doordarshan days with similar sad tales of old people - two of them had a 40-something Rajesh Khanna play much older characters. Now there is nothing wrong in re-adapting an old plot with a new look. The thing is, Baghban adds nothing to the story by way of interpretation. The sons and daughters are all like one big, insensitive monolith. The two happy-family songs in the family at the beginning and the sudden turn-around in all the characters as soon as they learn that their old father is broke after retirement, has all the depth of a Madhur Bhandarkar film. In real life, when old parents move in with their sons and bahus after many years of both couples living independently, there always are domestic problems, conflicting lifestyles and a difficult phase of adjustment. This does not happen because either the parents or the children are bad people, but because they are different. But again, Baghban is not a psychological study, it is a Hindi film with an emotional story. And there comes the main source of my prejudice - just a few years before Baghban, there came a Marathi film called Tu Tithe Mee, whose traces are all too evident in the later Hindi film. And Tu Tithe Mee is such a gem.
