Salman Khan says he can’t do away with the Bollywood staple in his films
Nayandeep Rakshit (DNA; July 20, 2015)

Salman Khan’s Bajrangi Bhaijaan has opened to the highest ever pre-Eid day collections. The Eid day collections were obviously higher. Collections apart, the film has touched a chord with people. It makes you smile and tear up in equal doses.

The heartwarming film is a near-perfect package of love, religion and patriotism all in perfect measure, plus naach-gaana. The soundtrack has something for everyone.

Trust Salman to be different. At a time when his contemporaries Akshay Kumar, Shah Rukh Khan, Saif Ali Khan and others are opting for a no song-and-dance approach to their films, Salman is against it. “This no naach-gaana business doesn’t work for me at all,” he shrugs.

He explains, “I am not going to do a film which will not have any normal music, comedy or romance. That’s our format and I think, we are the best industry ever because we can always dip in and dip out. We can try different genres in one film. Not just that, because we do it so often, our audiences are trained to watch stuff like that.”

He feels his audience would be disappointed if there were no song and dance in his films. “After all, whatever we do in a film is to make the audience and our fans happy. If my films don’t have songs and dances, they would be disappointed. I know that. I would never want that,” he tells us.

While most people approach Hindi films in a Hollywoodised manner, Salman thinks that “American films, Hollywood films have just one straight line, but if you have just that in a Hindi film, people will be like, ‘Yeh kya hai boring sa’. I don’t think that will work here. We need the music, the romance. Yet we need the good-versus-bad and the triumph of good over evil,” he explained his stand. “And at times, you have the good as slightly grey like in Dabangg, but in the end, he’s a good man fighting for a good reason,” he signs off.