The year 2012 witnessed the rise of a new superstar! It turned out to be our favorite, the moment ‘it’ was born. ‘Superstar’ and ‘It’? Loose connection…right?
Well, let us fix the connection for you by revealing that the superstar ‘it’ is none other than our favorite ‘housefly’ a.k.a ‘EEGA’, which has taken birth here and has almost flown over the major ‘woods’ of our Indian cinema spilling the magic nectar wherever it went. Incepted as a short story of a hero reincarnating as a housefly and despite of its prolonged shoots and repeated postponements, ‘EEGA’ went on to be a smash hit in all the four languages [Eega in Telugu, Naan Ee in Tamil, Eecha in Malayalam and Makkhi in Hindi] it released and now bagged two National Awards under ‘Best Regional Film’ and ‘Special Effects’ categories at the 60th National Awards announced recently.
Eega is a romantic fantasy fictional film where the protagonist (Nani) avenges his own death reincarnating as a housefly helped by his lady love (Samantha) in the due course. Released on 5th July 2012, this small film directed by the box-office ring master S.S. Rajamouli went on to be a rage right from its genesis. The director who is known for his record hit streak with his trade mark style of commercial storytelling, for the first time left many quite dazed when he announced this project. With an out of the box concept and with no big names in the project, there were many bitter lips and thumbs down all through the making of the film, but S.S. Rajamouli proved why he is called ‘Sure’ ‘Success’ Rajamouli. He made a tiny housefly take over a mighty villain like Sudeep and the entire masses had their jaws dropped! And this time as a colloquial Telugu maxim (Don’t keep your mouth open, flies might enter) rightly says fly has entered the opened jaws!
Of course, our rumor mills never sit mum. Especially, they simply can’t take an unconventional act. Well, ‘Eega’ also suffered a similar allegation that it is a rip off or rather based on a 14minute Australian romantic short film, where the protagonist (Charlie) is accidentally run over by his own wedding car and reincarnates as a cockroach desperately trying to woo back his grieved wife, that released on 30th March 2010 (a couple of years before Eega’s release). But, there is no hard and fast rule on any Berlin wall that a similar idea can’t spring up in two different minds and even if it is loosely inspired, adapting it to our Telugu nativity and recreating the magic is only possible to S.S. Rajamouli – Take a bow master!
Kudos to the entire Eega team and awaiting entertaining experiments like these….
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