A Congregation of Indian Superheroes - Lokmanya

A few days ago, I saw the movie 'Lokmanya', a movie on the legendary freedom fighter Lokmanya Balwantrao Gangadhar Tilak. I had very high expectations from the movie based on the reviews but as it turned out, the reviews were strongly influenced by the emotions of the reviewers because of the subject of the movie. It was a decent movie; not a bad one but it was nothing that would warrant the gloried reviews that I had read. This is only as far as the direction of the movie and how the 'movie' looked on the screen. However, as far as the story goes, it's history and that was simply mind-blowing. The tenacity and the conviction of the great man is still very inspiring and moving. Even in the face of knee-buckling pressure, he stood fast on his ideals and continued with his work.

Although I did not enjoy the direction and some dialogues in the movie, which were extremely cliche and unnecessary, I did enjoy it for one very surprising thing. There have been hardly any Indian superheroes, unless one counts the Hindu deities and the characters from the Hindu epics like the Ramayana and Mahabharata. I am referring to this comic book ones. This movie made me feel like I was watching an Indian 'Avengers' movie with all of India's legends in it. I realised that I was watching a movie with a congregation of all of India's legends, who were definitely superheroes of their times. Watching the movie, I also realised that so many of the people we, as Indians idolize, at one point of time, were all living at the same time. It wasn't the best time for India, being still a British Colony, but what a time it must have been to living in the same time as these legends.

Here are a few of them:

1. Bal Gangadhar Tilak
2. Bipinchandra Pal
3. Lal Bahadur Shastri
4. Lala Lajpat Rai
5. Mohandas Gandhi
6. Gopal Krishna Gokhale
7. Gopal Ganesh Agarkar
8. Jyotiba Phule
9. Savitribai Phule
10. Swami Vivekananda
11. Khudiram Bose
12. The Chaphekar Brothers
13.  Anant Kanhere
14. Daji Khare
15. Vishnu Shastri
16. Bhagat Singh
17. Rajguru
18. Sukhdev
19. Dr. Ambedkar
20. Chandrashekhar Azad
21. Mahadeo Govind Ranade
22. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar

Now, these are the names that I can recollect and I am sure I have missed out so many more to whom I owe my independence.

During the movie, I was overwhelmed that I am the citizen of a nation that had produced such greats, such legends, such superheroes!