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By:

Rajeev Puri

24 October 2024 at 5:11:37 am

Before Sholay, there was Mera Gaon Mera Desh

When the comedian and television host Kapil Sharma recently welcomed the veteran screenwriter Salim Khan onto his show, he made a striking claim. India, he joked, has a national bird and a national animal; it ought also to have a national film. That film, he suggested, would surely be Sholay. Few would quarrel with the sentiment. Released in 1975 and directed by Ramesh Sippy,  Sholay  has long been treated as the Everest of Hindi popular cinema -quoted endlessly, revisited by generations and...

Before Sholay, there was Mera Gaon Mera Desh

When the comedian and television host Kapil Sharma recently welcomed the veteran screenwriter Salim Khan onto his show, he made a striking claim. India, he joked, has a national bird and a national animal; it ought also to have a national film. That film, he suggested, would surely be Sholay. Few would quarrel with the sentiment. Released in 1975 and directed by Ramesh Sippy,  Sholay  has long been treated as the Everest of Hindi popular cinema -quoted endlessly, revisited by generations and dissected by critics. In 2025, the film marked its 50th anniversary, and the release of a digitally restored, uncut version introduced the classic to a new generation of viewers who discovered that its mixture of revenge drama, western pastiche and buddy comedy remains curiously durable. The film’s influences have been debated almost as much as its dialogues – from scenes taken by the Spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, particularly ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ (1968) or to the narrative architecture of ‘Seven Samurai’ (1954) by Akira Kurosawa. Others note echoes of earlier Hindi films about bandits and frontier justice, such as ‘Khotey Sikke’ (1973) starring Feroz Khan. Yet, rewatching ‘Mera Gaon Mera Desh,’ directed by Raj Khosla, one cannot help noticing how many of the narrative bones of  Sholay  appear to have been assembled there first. Released in 1971,  Mera Gaon Mera Desh  was a major hit at the box office, notable for holding its own in a year dominated by the near-hysterical popularity of Rajesh Khanna. The thematic framework of the two films is strikingly similar. In  Sholay , the retired policeman Thakur Baldev Singh recruits two petty criminals - Jai and Veeru - to help him avenge the terror inflicted upon his village by the bandit Gabbar Singh. In  Mera Gaon Mera Desh , the set-up is not very different. A retired soldier, Jaswant Singh, seeks to protect his village from a ruthless dacoit and enlists the help of a small-time crook named Ajit. Even the villain’s name seems to echo across the two films. In Khosla’s drama, the marauding bandit played by Vinod Khanna is scene-stealing performance is called Jabbar Singh. In  Sholay , the outlaw who would become one of Indian cinema’s most memorable antagonists was Gabbar Singh. There is an additional irony in the casting. In  Mera Gaon Mera Desh , the retired soldier Jaswant Singh is played by Jayant - the real-life father of Amjad Khan, who would later immortalise Gabbar Singh in  Sholay . The connective tissue between the two films becomes even clearer in the presence of Dharmendra. In Khosla’s film he plays Ajit, a charming rogue who gradually redeems himself while defending the village. Four years later, Dharmendra returned in  Sholay  as Veeru, a similarly exuberant petty criminal whose courage and irrepressible humour make him one half of Hindi cinema’s most beloved buddy duo alongside Amitabh Bachchan as Jai. Certain visual motifs also appear to have travelled intact. In Khosla’s film, Ajit finds himself bound in ropes in the bandit’s den during a dramatic musical sequence. A similar image appears in  Sholay , where Veeru is tied up before Gabbar Singh while Basanti performs the now famous song ‘Jab Tak Hai Jaan.’ Other echoes are subtler but just as suggestive. Ajit’s pursuit of the village belle Anju, played by Asha Parekh, anticipates Veeru’s boisterous attempts to woo Basanti, portrayed by Hema Malini. Scenes in which Ajit teaches Anju to shoot recall the flirtatious gun-training sequence between Veeru and Basanti that became one of  Sholay ’s most cherished moments. Even the famous coin motif has a precedent. Ajit frequently tosses a coin to make decisions - a flourish that would later appear in  Sholay , where Jai’s coin toss becomes a running gag. Perhaps most intriguingly, the endings of the two films converge in their original form. In  Mera Gaon Mera Desh , the villain is ultimately killed by the hero. The uncut version of  Sholay  reportedly ended in a similar fashion, with Gabbar Singh meeting his death at the hands of Thakur Baldev Singh. However, censors altered the climax before the film’s 1975 release, requiring that Gabbar be handed over to the police instead. All this does not diminish  Sholay . Rather, it highlights the alchemy through which cinema evolves. The scriptwriting duo Salim–Javed took familiar ingredients and expanded them into a grander narrative populated by unforgettable characters and stylised action. On the 55 th  anniversary of  Mera Gaon Mera Desh , Raj Khosla’s rugged western deserves a renewed glance as the sturdy foundation on which a legend called  Sholay  was built. (The author is a political commentator and a global affairs observer. Views personal.)

Opportunistic Embrace

Trump’s lavish welcome for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman lays bare a US–Saudi partnership driven by deals in billions of dollars and a blind eye to murder.

President Donald Trump meets Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Oval Office of the White House on Tuesday.
President Donald Trump meets Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Oval Office of the White House on Tuesday.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s return to Washington this week - his first since Jamal Khashoggi’s murder in 2018 - was choreographed with all the extravagance of a state visit. President Donald Trump welcomed him to the White House with military trimmings, smiles and a flourish of flags. It was, in every sense, a political theatre of indulgence as Saudi Arabia and the United States renewed an alliance rooted less in shared values than in a frank, transactional opportunism.


The Crown Prince arrived armed with eye-catching promises. Saudi investment in the United States, he announced, would jump from $600bn to nearly $1trn - an extraordinary pledge at a moment when America is hungry for foreign capital. The two sides are also preparing agreements spanning defence, nuclear energy and a high-profile purchase of US-made F-35 fighter jets. The White House under Trump’s second term is eager to present this as proof of revitalised American leadership and economic clout. Riyadh sees it as a way to expand influence in Washington while diversifying its own strategic dependencies.


But awkward moments ensued when reporters pressed the Crown Prince on the most sensitive scars in the relationship: the 9/11 attacks and the 2018 assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. MBS insisted, as he has done for years, that Osama bin Laden, himself a Saudi national, intended the September 11th attacks to rupture US-Saudi relations, and that anyone questioning Riyadh’s commitment to counterterrorism was helping to fulfil bin Laden’s goal. The families of victims, furious at his presence in the Oval Office, were unmoved. America’s intelligence agencies, too, have been clear that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens, and the kingdom’s export of extremist ideology in earlier decades created fertile ground for bin Laden’s rise.


On Khashoggi, the Crown Prince offered little beyond familiar denials. More extraordinary was Trump’s intervention. Sitting beside MBS, the president dismissed the CIA’s 2018 conclusion that the Crown Prince personally ordered the journalist’s murder. Khashoggi, Trump airily declared, had been “extremely controversial.” “Things happen,” he added, absolving his guest with a shrug that would have been unthinkable for any previous American president.


But the logic underpinning this performance was entirely consistent. For Trump, the opportunist salesman, the moral cost of overlooking a murder is outweighed by the prospect of lucrative business. Saudi Arabia already holds significant investments in the Trump family’s orbit, including the $2bn handed by Riyadh’s sovereign wealth fund to Jared Kushner’s private equity firm. A Trump Tower and a Trump Plaza are planned for Jeddah; two more projects are scheduled for Riyadh.


For MBS, the United States remains the indispensable security provider in the Gulf, the backbone of the Saudi military and the political guarantor Riyadh turns to in moments of regional crisis. By dangling vast investments and weapons deals before an American president keen to claim economic victories, MBS can demand concessions while signalling that Saudi Arabia has alternatives from Chinese investment to Russian coordination on oil markets.


The geopolitical context makes the embrace even more revealing. In the past, the United States has tolerated Saudi excesses from the oil embargo of 1973 to decades of Wahhabi proselytisation. The Middle East is again in flux: wars in Gaza and Yemen, shifting alignments in the Gulf and a global scramble for energy security. Washington needs stable partners as it focuses more of its attention on Asia. Riyadh wants strategic autonomy while still benefiting from America’s military umbrella. The result is a relationship in which both sides privately distrust each other, yet publicly cling to the fiction of strategic harmony.


The opportunism that sustains the US-Saudi alliance may be unseemly, but it offers flexibility in an unstable world. What neither side can admit openly is that this flexibility is precisely what makes the partnership both resilient and perpetually fragile - a bargain held together by a mutual willingness to look away when inconvenient truths intrude.

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