Mumbai, Aug 19 Veteran screenwriter Javed Akhtar of the legendary duo Salim-Javed, has opened up on the friendship of Jai and Veeru in the iconic film ‘Sholay’.
The veteran writer spoke with playback singer Sonu Nigam, and recollected how he and his partner Salim Khan sketched the characters of the two protagonists, and their dynamics. He said that the film set a different trend of cinematic friendships and broke the clutter of all the existing norms of the time when it came to male friendships.
He told Sonu in a podcast for Spotify, “If you see the films before Sholay, in which there is male bonding, then there were some very syrupy things in it. One friend says to another friend, ‘If I asked for your life, then what will you do’. There were such dialogues. In this picture, the best friends that you see, they did not talk about any friendship”.
He further mentioned that both Jai and Veeru would also land each other in trouble, which presented the true essence of their friendship. One instance of this is when Jai (played by Amitabh Bachchan) goes to speak with the mausi of Basanti to ask for the latter’s hand in marriage for his friend Jai (Dharmendra).
Javed shared, “Always pulling each other's leg, joking, showing off to each other, and you can see that they are very good friends. This is real male bonding, which happens, that was the first time. Otherwise, prior to this, it was a syrupy relationship. Lovers used to look at each other like how cinematic friends would look at each other in films/ It doesn't look like this here. They were comrades. So, the things that we had to say, which we did not put in the dialogue, all came in that song ‘Ye Dosti’”.
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