A few days before, I had a lengthy, rather an unpleasant argument with my friend. This was about the lack of creativity in our entertainment industry. We all know of how our music directors plagiarise stuff from the west. From Rahman to Harris Jayaraj, nobody is exception to this. Recently, I heard the original of "Uyirin Uyire..." of "Kakka Kakka".

I had good respect for people like Kamal Hassan and Mani Ratnam. The friend with whom I had this argument listed out various hollywood movies from which Kamal had lifted the stories and themes. I double checked. She was right about all the films. She had similar opinion about Mani Ratnam too. One whom I thought is the greatest in Tamil. She said his latest Yuva is inspired by Amorres Perros, a spanish film. I read the reports too but didn't believe them or her. I rented Amorres Perros and found that, to my amazement and shame, Mani Ratnam had plagiarised the basic form of screenplay. I didn't know how to react and that evening, it instantly put all other works of -good and bad- Mani Ratnam under scrutiny. Funnily enough, the story of Yuva did not demand an Amorres Perros treatment.

I know that Nayakan is Godfather Indianised and Anjali has traces of E.T. and Dalpati is a leaf out of Mahabharata. Nevertheless, I hadn't doubted his intentions as a film maker. Nayakan, despite aping Marlon Brando, is a path breaking film. The Tamil industry can unarguably be classified as BN and AN.

But Yuva was quite upsetting. I must say that Mani Ratnam has lost a good fan and an avid advocate. As Ganesh points out, if "we" have to do something, someone else "should have" done it already.

This is perhaps the reason why nothing big or spectacular ever happens in our industry. For that matter in every walk of life in our country.