Imagine that you are standing on a bridge. Beneath you is a railway track where a wagon is approaching at high speed. You see that there are five men bound to the wagon. You also realise that there is a huge boulder on the track that will impact the wagon in the next ten seconds, and leave all five men instantaneously dead.

Just as you feel overwhelming despair, you realise that you have the power to prevent the five deaths. Standing beside you on the bridge is a fat guy who can be pushed down to the track below to slow down the wagon sufficiently to make its impact with the boulder quite harmless. The guy, who is staring at the sky, blissfully unaware that his destiny is being played with, will certainly lose his life in that case. What do you do?

(Many thanks to the person who described this scenario for me and listened to my responses with interest.)

Before anything else, let me clarify that you can assume certain things. You are strong enough to push the guy down, which is likely given the surprise element. Also, for the sake of simplicity, there are no grey areas – death is certain and instantaneous, be it the fat guy or the five men.

For those who are coming across this scenario for the first time, like I was very recently, several things might strike you. Practical details aside, the simple question “what do you do” translates into a million other questions that span the spectrum of ethics and values. Do I let one guy die and save five others?

But what if the five are criminals being taken to the executioner, and would have died on the electric chair in another couple of hours anyway? Then it makes no sense to let one more person die needlessly. What if the fat guy was the one who had tied up the five men? Even then, what if he had done this without knowing that there would be a boulder on the track? Or had merely done his duty as a police constable? And all these are just a subset of the possible plethora of questions. If you start thinking of options such as yourself jumping down (and hopefully not breaking too many bones) and derailing the wagon in some manner, or pushing away the boulder, you open a veritable Pandora’s box.

In any case, who am I to decide, you ask yourself.

What a muddle! Let me tell you what I finally decided. Given that I have neither information nor the time to gather information, I decide to do nothing. Oh, so I let the five men die by my inaction? But if I were to take the stance that saving five lives is better than one, I am immediately placing a value on each life and comparing one against five, which I simply cannot do. Yes, it seems instinctive to let the larger good win, but what is the larger good? Life does not go by numbers alone.

So, here’s my clincher. Research has shown that the negative impact, on your conscience and well-being, of action is far more than that of inaction. Meaning that if I were to remain a passive spectator and convince myself that I really had no choice, I would at least retain my peace of mind. Instead, if I were to act and save five people by killing one guy (mind you, not letting one guy die but acting to kill him), the guilt itself could make living impossible for me. So, ultimately, for rather selfish reasons, I do nothing. I would have preferred to jump down and save the five men myself. But then, how often does life give you a chance at successful heroism of the kind where you emerge alive?!

Well, what would you do?

Why should MBA students watch movies? This question was unexpectedly answered by the movie Dabangg. But more on this later.

Dabangg is one movie which is difficult to dislike, just like its protagonist Chulbul Pandey. You may not be a fan of Rajnikant’s sunglasses-rotation act in Tamil movies, and you may not be a fan of Salman Khan either, but when our hero quite unassumingly tries a Rajnikant act in Dabangg, in spite of yourself you excuse it and perhaps even outright enjoy it.

So here’s a movie that has no secret agenda up its sleeve, and perhaps that was why the audiences loved it – irrespective of whether they watched it in a multiplex or in a single-screen theatre. (Anyone reading this remember the time when you did not have to specify that a movie theatre was “single-screen” and not a multiplex?) In fact, the best part about Dabangg is that it does not moralise like 3 Idiots did, and thus escapes being hypocritical.

The character Chulbul Pandey is, for reasons that vary according to the viewer, very likeable. He is a “macho-man”, as you would expect any Salman Khan role to be. But he is also kind, almost harmless – he hurts only villains, although he might pretend to hurt his brother or father. “The bhai who never grew up seems to have finally become the boy who can do no wrong” is what Kaveree Bamzai has to say in the India Today issue of November 1, 2010.

Chulbul Pandey thus has an element of dabangg in him – a spirit of fearlessness. (Now dabangg was one word that improved both my Hindi vocabulary and my humility with respect to it…) This element of audacity is what led my group in a class on Advertising to suggest that Mahindra and Mahindra present its newly launched bikes with the tagline “there’s a bit of dabangg in everyone.” And why not? Yeah, it sounds quite clichéd now, in hindsight, but if marketing is critical for movies, then so are movies for marketing!

Getting back to the point. You know that a movie is made to entertain when the hero’s brother is called makkhi and there is no reel sorrow when the heroine’s father dies. As for real sorrow, Dabangg does not care to tread into that hazardous territory as Taare Zameen Par does. For that matter, it does not even reach the pseudo-real sorrow that Salman Khan himself portrays when talking to the sky in Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam. The songs are catchy, in spite of not making any claims to greatness. They were there because any Bollywood movie needs songs to succeed, and like all other features of the movie, they willingly defer to the hero.

The song Munni badnaam hui is interesting from a marketing point of view. The movie-makers conducted an unintended ‘product placement’, to use a technical term, by using the brand name Zandu in the song. Initially, Emami who owns the brand sued producer Arbaaz Khan for using their trademark. Now, unsurprisingly, Zandu balm sales have soared largely as a result of the controversy. (Read the whole story here.) Not bad, eh? Free publicity, when you were thinking of it the least.

There is a Malayalam saying which can be loosely translated as “The curse by Urvasi became a blessing for Arjuna.” Those familiar with the Mahabharata would understand. To an extent, this has taken place for Emami though it is not very clear whether being featured in a song starring Salman Khan is a curse or a blessing.

All in all, a feel-good entertainer that starts off by setting the right expectations and matching them, instead of setting expectations too high and then barely reaching there. Who knows, this might be what the audience really wants. If such a thing as “what the audience wants” exists.

<Personal opinion disclaimer applies.>