Madhur Bhandarkar's "Satta" (The Power).

Madhur Bhandarkar is a well known director for giving wonderful films like Chandani Bar, Page 3, Corporate, Traffic Signal etc. I recently had a chance to see his old film "Satta" which means the power (here, in this film, it means the political power).
It is the story of a simple girl (Raveena Tandon) who is working with an advertising company and who came from upper middle class family. She is happy with her work and totally engrossed in it.
Once, an upcoming MLA and the son of a sitting MLA, Sameer Dharmadhikari sees her in a discothèque and attracts towards her. He is a possessive kind of person and due to political environment at home; he feels that everything that he likes should be his own property and he has various kinds of bad habits too.
Then he proposes Raveena and marries her.
But few days after the marriage, Raveena experiences tremendous difference in her home atmosphere and in-laws atmosphere - the shrewd in-laws, their double standards, non-ethical behavior, Sameer’s changing attitude towards her, their anti-women traditions etc.
For the learned and independent girl like her, it is difficult to digest all this. This kind of family environment suffocates her. But she is not prepared to live separately from Sameer since her mother has taken divorce with her father long back and she does not want to repeat the history as she herself experienced the pain of the divided family.
Days pass on and one fine day Sameer shoots a bartender since she refuses to serve the alcohol after the given time limit (Like Jessica Lal). And now he is in police custody.
This happens at the beginning of the assembly elections and since Sameer is in police custody, the party proposes her to be a candidate for the election.
As a common Indian, she also has a feeling that politics is the last resort of scoundrels and it is not a cup of tea for a gentle person like her. But her friends suggest her that it is her only chance to come out of that dirty environment and to establish herself.
Therefore she decides to face the voters and after some initial hassles she wins the election. And the game of dirty politics begins.
Every person in the party tries to control the power and for that he is ready to go to any extend. Meanwhile Sameer also from police custody tries to control her.
But gradually Raveena learns from others and use the same tactics and destroy their wicked plans and makes a gentle senior person from her party a chief minister and sees that he will not be harmed by others.
To see the change in her is really thrilling and the way she takes the decision is also astonishing knowing her previous back-ground. Indeed, Raveena is a powerful and mature actress who justified the main role in this film.
Lastly she shows that Satta means the power which is to use for good result and coincidently the word “Satta” which has the Samskrit origin means the same i.e. सत् + ता, the power of goodness.
I was very delighted seeing this film and specially the performance of Raveena and directorial skill of Madhur Bhandarkar. I feel that this was a film worth being superheat. May be because, Madhur was not well known that time and therefore the public was not attracted to this film much.
But if you have a chance, I’ll recommend that do see this film because it gives us a simple message that only cursing the politics will not help. The gentle people should enter the politics and clean this sector of society with the support of the other good people who are trying to make the politics a place to uplifting the poor, backward, downtrodden populace economically as well as socially.

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