ROCKSTAR (2011)
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mostly of white men and women, watches entranced, as Janardan from Pitampura, now Jordan the rockstar in harem pants and a modified Gandhi topi, sing a Punjabi sufi-rock song. As an event, there’s absolutely nothing amiss here. Everybody listens to anything. Except in the film Rockstar, it is a moment of perfect unease.
Jordan is the highest-selling artist of an Indian record company named Platinum Records, which is manned by a Punjabi who also sells pop versions of Hindu mata ki chowki chants. He is a boy from Pitampura who made it big. He is embittered in love. And he sings beautiful Punjabi-Sufi blues. How does he become the musical prodigy the world listens to? Largely by being forced to keep away from the woman he loves—Heer, a Kashmiri woman who is now married and lives in a castle in Prague. His music has soulful venom; it’s beautiful music. But he is certainly not a rockstar who can swing a gig at Prague and have millions throng it—the film so far does not justify or explain it, except that he has to be in Prague to find his love back. The hysterical fans just happen to be waiting there for Delhi’s Jordan.