Mera password Maan Hai – The greatest passwords in Hindi Cinema!
Have you ever been flabbergasted while watching a password being hacked / cracked or just plain guessed by our Bollywood superstars? We have been stunned as well but instead of being critical or trying to understand the mechanism of the process, we just celebrate them. Here is a list of a few which in our opinion are truly the greatest ever feats of passwords or hacks in Bollywood.
Angoor: The detective novel maniac, Ashok, and his trusted opium-addict aide, Bahadur, come to the city with a lot of money on them. Ashok, fuelled by stories of the evil city, is paranoid — he suspects every person on the street, especially when they all talk to him like he’s a familiar face. Little does he know that the town holds another Ashok and another Bahadur; long-separated identical twins. Driven to a near breakdown, the detective-novel fanatic Ashok decrees that to enter his room, his Bahadur must use the song “Preetam aan milo” as the password. Bahadur, as it happens in these movies, follows the other Ashok to his house, gets high on opium, and croons “Preetam Aan Milo” to the mystified household. Even Shakespeare could not have dreamt up the comedy of errors that the password in Angoor created.
Sapoot: Every director who thinks he has a gritty side to him has wanted to remake The Godfather, but no one could have doused the movie in as much garam masala as Jagdish A. Sharma in the path breaking Sapoot. First, he cast Kader Khan as the Godfather who doesn’t deal in drugs. Then, he decided to populate the movie with the past masters of B-Gold 90s action, Suniel Shetty and Akshay Kumar. (The former’s face is capable of the emotional range of a Canara Bank employee on a stultifying Monday morning, and the latter was, at that point, still better at cooking Thai food.)
In the iconic scene, Suniel Shetty and Mahavir Shah are having a random conversation near a swimming pool, if memory serves us well. Suniel Shetty wants to light up one and asks Mahavir Shah for a maachis (matchstick) and our man Shah, snaps back saying, “Maachis hoti do duniya ko aag lagaa deta”. A flabbergasted Suniel Shetty is about to take care of business when Mahavir Shah explains that this is the password for a deal to happen soon. While we couldn’t find that iconic scene, we give you the deal-making scene. Maachis?- Pure bliss.
16 December: Hindi movie celebrated the coming of the digital age with this gadget-filled spy movie that has classic sequences involving people explaining what e-mail is. The “agents” are not coolly RAW or Intelligence Bureau or any such thing. They are from the vastly underrated and underrepresented Revenue Intelligence. (If you’re sniggering away, let me remind you that it was the very same Revenue Intelligence that exposed the Nira Radia scam.) But then, I’m not sure the Revenue Intelligence is even one-hundredth as cool as this movie makes them out to be. I don’t think they have posh snipers, state-of-the-art surveillance equipment, an army of hackers, Milind Soman and an informer as hot as Aditi Govitrikar. This movie featured the greatest password to defuse a nuclear bomb in all cinematic history — “Dulhan ki bidayi ka waqt badalna hai”.
Not only did the bomb in that movie require a password, it required the password to be spoken in Gulshan Grover’s voice. The bomb, by this point, has been smuggled into a college fest (yes, a college fest – who would expect a terrorist attack when ‘culturals’ are happening!) as “musical equipment”, and Gulshan Grover immediately does what every terrorist does before launching a nuclear attack. He plays the drums. In a very fake manner, with an expression conveying heightened calm and fulfillment. Like he’s just slept with three supermodels at the same time. And how do they get him to say the password? They have a phone conversation with him where they “trick” him into saying the relevant words out of context. So ingenious. So yummy.
Ajnabee: You would think that the most ridiculous scene from this classic from the Abbas-Mustan universe (Just like masters such as Wes Anderson and Tim Burton, Abbas-Mustan’s movies are clearly not set on this planet, and definitely do not feature regular, intelligent, human beings) would be the one where Akshay Kumar and Bipasha Basu escape from landlocked Switzerland on a ship. But it is not. The scene where Bobby Deol cracks Akshay Kumar’s ingenious password makes me want to stand up and applaud.
First, he shocks Akshay by entering his account number correctly. Strike One. The deliciously tacky Bank of Singapore website (I’m surprised the Bank didn’t sue Abbas-Mustan for defamation!) asks for a password. Now it is Akshay’s turn to look smug. But Bobby is not one to bow down under pressure. He makes general comment on how people set passwords — ease of remembrance, he says, like a date of birth. But he laughs, and adds, “Lekin tu to aisa nahi kar sakta – tu to lawaaris hai.” Strike Two. Then he thinks, (this thinking expression rivals Suniel Shetty, really.) very briefly, if you took time off to pick your nose, you’ve missed his thinking expression, and declares, “Tu ek baat hamesha bolta rahta hai…” and types furiously into the computer, dramatically rotates the computer around and declares victoriously, “Yehi hai na?” The computer, at this point, in large, bold lettering, proudly declares, “EVERYTHING IS PLANNED”. Bobby Deol calmly presses the return key for punch effect. The computer says, “PASSWORD ACCEPTED”. Strike Three and You’re Out.
Some security pointers from us for Bank of Singapore — please make sure your passwords don’t appear on the screen as one types; please allow both small and capital letters, it helps people set stronger passwords.
Agent Vinod: One of the scenes I really liked in this movie was the perfectly pitched, planned and executed scene where Kazaan administers the lethal injection to his ailing pet camel. From the plaster on the camel’s body to the detailing of the room in which it was housed, from the sensitive background music to the solemnity of everyone’s expression, from the sheer absurdity of the situation to the fact that it does strike a chord, everything in this scene was brilliant. It was the best set-piece in a movie that was a collection of set-pieces anyway.
Sadly, Sriram Raghavan felt the need to make this scene relevant to the larger themes of the movie. In the climax, since he cannot crack the password to defuse the nuclear bomb, Agent Vinod has only one way to save the country from nuclear disaster, and the world from retaliatory holocaust — he must fly the helicopter with the bomb into a pit far away from civilisation. Obviously, at this point, instead of concentrating on his helicopter-flying, his team decides to give him one last wish. A lesser man would have wished for Tandoori Chicken, but Vinod wants to speak to the love of his life, Iram. In this country, you get fined for talking on the phone while driving a car on the road, but a RAW Agent, with a nuclear bomb in his helicopter, is still allowed to say bye to his lady love. The lady love, after telling him that she has a bullet in her liver, proceeds to inform him that the password for the bomb is “Jilleh”, the name of that camel! Talking to him in that state kills her, but the password she gives saves the world. Jai mata di!
Image: hindustantimes.com
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