New Delhi, January 7:

	Bollywood’s date with disaster
	• Waqt (1965) : The film revolves around a close-knit family who get dislocated after an earthquake. • The Burning Train (1980): The movie is about an angry man who jeopardises the lives of people aboard a train after being refused a job by the railways.

YOU”VE seen love in Kargil, murder in Mumbai’s underbelly and all that’s inspired by Veerappan. But when was the last time a calamity hit Hindi films? Nothing scares Bollywood moguls more than disasters. Twenty-five years ago there was Ravi Chopra’s The Burning Train about a young man’s anger on a packed train after the railways refuse him a job, and his girlfriend falls in love with his childhood pal. But that 1980 flick failed to set the box office on fire.

‘‘Here people have a herd mentality. If my Burning Train had worked, there would have been more movies on disasters,’’ says Ravi, who was inspired by his father (B R Chopra) the producer of Waqt (1965), India’s most successful disaster film till date. A broken Balraj Sahni is caught in a storm, with his family scattered, while Sahir Ludhianvi’s immortal reminder Admi ko chahiye waqt se bachkar rahe, plays in the background. ‘‘Nobody has the patience to make a film like Waqt. Globalisation has spread the good feeling and no film-maker dares to spoil the party with a costly disaster flick,’’ says Govind Nihalani, who directed films on the partition (Tamas) and the Gujarat riots (Dev). ‘‘Mine were about man-made disasters.’’

In contrast, Hollywood has constantly explored the danger zones— Titanic, Twister and The Day After Tomorrow (a new ice age). ‘‘Titanic earned Rs 18 crore in India and ran for a year, while Twister made Rs 3 crore in just three weeks,’’ says a spokesperson for Twentieth Century Fox, which released the films in India. ‘‘Hollywood loves disaster films,’’ says distributor Shravan Shroff. ‘‘I’m sure somebody in Hollywood has already started working on a tsunami subject.’’

Writers blame it on the producers. ‘‘We can write disaster stories, but who will buy them?’’ asks Javed Siddiqui who wrote the dialogues for Rakesh Roshan’s sci-fi extravaganza Koi Mil Gaya.

Besides the usual excuses of non-availibility of funds and special effects facilities, there’s that cultural thing. -‘‘The West, especially America, lives in constant fear,’’ explains director Shyam Benegal. ‘‘Film-makers feed on people’s fear.’’ So when a Michael Moore recaptures the terror of 9/11 in Fahrenheit 9/11, he hits the headlines.

‘‘We like escapist films,’’ says trade analyst Komal Nahta. It took more than a decade for someone like Anurag Kashyap to film Black Friday, based on journalist S Hussain Zaidi’s book by the same name, about the 1993 Mumbai blasts. ‘‘I was pleasantly surprised when Anurag approached me for a film. I never thought Bollywood would be interested in non-fiction,’’ says Zaidi.