Vishwatma

<p>Prabhat Singh is an honest and dedicated police officer, but he usually has no time for his family and due to this, his father is constantly at loggerheads with him. Prabhat’s father believes in peace and opposes violence. Prabhat is now placed on a mission to apprehend the most dreaded crime Lord, Ajgar Jurrat, who currently lives in but operates in India. Ajgar has a rivalry with another Crime Lord, Madan Bharadwaj. Ajgar plans to kill Madan and his brothers in a single move. But the youngest Bharadwaj brother, Akash, who is not involved in any criminal activities of his mafia brothers, overhears Ajgar. He tries to stop Ajgar but fails when Prabhat arrives at the scene and arrests Akash while Ajgar’s gang flees from the spot. Akash requests Prabhat to save his brothers. Prabhat goes to Bharadwaj’s place but Ajgar was able to eliminate the Bhardwajs before his arrival and Ajgar’s son Rajnag, raped Madan’s wife, the lone survivor of the massacre. While escaping, Ajgar’s brother, Nagdansh was fatally shot by Prabhat. Ajgar, enraged by the death of his younger brother, abducts and kills Prabhat’s younger brother, Munna. Prabhat’s family is devastated and his father blames him for Munna’s death and disowns him. Prabhat leaves his job and moves to a remote corner of a distant village in India, where he takes in an orphan named Babu, who is his only friend. With Ajgar’s increasing criminal activities, the police commissioner decides to approach Prabhat as he is the only one who can capture Ajgar and take him back to India. After seeing the necessity of the situation, Prabhat’s father also changes his mind and decides to apologize for disowning Prabhat. To make amends, he tries to persuade Prabhat to take on the mission to capture Ajgar and bring him to justice. Prabhat agrees to take on the mission but insists that Akash also join him, to which Akash agrees. These two join hands and take the flight to Kenya. Meanwhile, Babu goes to live with Prabhat’s family. In Kenya, they are met by their host, an honest Officer of Indian Origin, Surya Pratap, a widower with a young daughter. Ajgar is already aware that Prabhat and Akash are there to capture him, so he convinces the Police Commissioner to assign Surya to be their guide, knowing fully well that the law-abiding Surya will make sure that Kenyan citizens like Ajgar will not be harmed by foreigners. Surya explicitly tells Prabhat and Akash, that he has his eyes on them and will not hesitate to apprehend them if they do any mischief during their stay. Prabhat and Akash find and meet Madan’s sister-in-law Renuka, who’s also seeking vengeance, so she helps them get nearer to Ajgar and offers them some more details on his whereabouts. She informs them that Ajgar is a respected citizen in Kenya, so it is much harder to apprehend him. They try many tricks to capture Ajgar and his henchmen, but Surya foils them each time. Prabhat and Akash then try to persuade Surya to arrest Ajgar, but Surya is reluctant to put Ajgar behind bars. As a result, Surya gets very frustrated with the duo, because he thinks they are causing trouble in Kenya. After a few days with the help of Renuka, Prabhat and Akash make a breakthrough to apprehend Ajgar without Surya’s knowledge and decide to make their move right away. Upon hearing this, a furious and betrayed Surya arrests them to be deported back to India. Renuka informs Surya about the truth behind his wife’s mysterious death: his wife died while trying to escape from Rajnag who attempted to rape her. After learning the truth and realizing that Prabhat and Akash were right after all, an enraged Surya confronts Ajgar but is captured along with his daughter. Prabhat and Akash, who have escaped their flight to India, rescue Surya, and the three join hands in the mission to catch Ajgar and his henchmen. In the end, the mission is successful. Prabhat, Surya, and Akash bring Ajgar and Rajnag back to India. Ajgar and his son attempt to escape but are fatally shot by Prabhat, Akash, and Surya. After the mega-success of his 1989 film , Rajiv Rai decided to embark on another action-thriller with three main male leads, and thus was conceived. Rai decided to go for a change of venue and planned to set much of the movie in Kenya. He wanted to cast the same three male leads as Tridev (Sunny Deol, Naseeruddin Shah, and Jackie Shroff). However, Jackie’s son had just been born and his astrologer had advised him to not travel abroad for a year. Thus Rai, after considering to launch , a personal friend, opted to cast instead of Shroff as one of the leads. Rai also reused many of the cast members from , including Amrish Puri as the main villain, and Raza Murad, Tej Sapru, and Dan Dhanoa as the secondary villains. One main difference being that while Dalip Tahil and Sharat Saxena played a negative role in , in this movie they had a positive role as the senior officer of Prabhat and the strict but comedic commissioner of the Kenya police respectively. Rai also included a short narration about the meaning of “Vishwatma” by Naseeruddin Shah in the movie, something that he had done with “Tridev” as well. Much of the shooting of the film was done in Kenya’s main cities of and . The song “Saat Samundar” was shot at the “Bubbles Discotheque”, a very popular club in Nairobi in those days. The climactic car chase was shot on the open plains of the Masai Mara National Wildlife Reserve. Many of the beach scenes were shot in Mombasa’s various beaches and beach hotels. The film also employs many phrases and words in its dialogue such as “Jambo” (Hello), “Mzuri sana” (Very nice), and “Mimi ni kubwa sana” (I am very big/great). After the success of the music of , everyone expected to conjure magic with this film. The soundtrack was well received, selling 2 million units and becoming the year’s seventh best-selling album. Its most popular song was “Saat Samundar Paar”, written by and rendered by . The song uses a from the song ” ” (1988). “Saat Samundar Paar” continues to play on radio stations and at discothèques (remixed) 30 years later. The Vishwatma theme is copied from Enigma’s Hallelujah with only the female humming as Viju Shah’s input. It features playback singers and (for Naseeruddin Shah), (for Jyostna Singh), (for Divya Bharti), (for Chunkey Pandey), (for Sonam) and (For Sunny Deol). For the 2014 movie , the producer bought the rights to the song “Saat Samundar” for Rs 1.5 crore. He did this to pay tribute to his late first wife Divya Bharti, on whom the song was picturized in . In , the song plays in the background when and are dancing in a disco. The other songs that got noticed when the film was released were “Aankhon Mein Hain Kya”, “Dil Le Gayi Teri Bindiya” and the title track. (who won her first Filmfare award with “Oye Oye — Tirchi Topi Wale” in ) sang two tracks in this film, but could not re-create the magic. All the songs were penned by Anand Bakshi.</p>