It's a bane of any director who makes a really good movie early on in his career that each of his subsequent creations are fated to be compared with the famous one, and Ashutosh Gowariker did have a tough act to follow. But let's talk of Swades without the shadow of Lagaan looming over it. And boy does it impress! The first plus point of Swades is that Shah Rukh Khan acts. He actually appears happy here that he has managed to bag one rare movie where the director has made some use of his acting skills. There are just two-three short instances where he returns to his typical habit of making funny faces, and that's pretty tolerable. Otherwise he does a really good job of the role. I hope he gets a Filmfare for this, not for Veer Zaara.

Gayatri Joshi is good too. Better than Gracy Singh. Sorry, we were not supposed to have comparisons. Her dialogue delivery is awkward at places, but otherwise a really nice job in a first movie. Of course having a strong role helped.

The rest of the actors put up a very competent show too. The lady who plays Shah Rukh's nanny (who I later came to know is named Kishori Balal) keeps away from the typical melodrama seen so often in our movies. In fact there's very little 'filmi' in the movie. Things are very realistic, not exactly real-life, but closer to it. Gowariker makes full use of NASA and we probably have the first rocket-launch in a Hindi movie here. The children are not the obnoxious kind that we typically see in present-day Hindi movies. The village is very authentic. Compare it with Karan Johar's glossy Chandni Chowk in K3G. The situations and people's reactions in those situations are authentic. The songs gel in very nicely with the story and you enjoy them thoroughly. The title-song which is the last song in the movie could be a tear-jerker for NRIs, quite like Chitthi aayi hai from Naam in the 80s. The story (and for a rare occasion in recent Hindi movies we do have one here) is good. The movie has a proper flow, and I don't know if there's a technical term for it. So technically and screenplay-wise Swades is very good. One more point to Ashutosh Gowariker.

But Swades is not perfect. Far from it actually. One obvious flaw is that the sermonizing gets to you after a point. The movie is close to three-and-a-half hours long and you feel it. And despite having its heart in the right place, the movie starts working against the message it is trying to convey if people get so bored that they start leaving the hall. In fact the songs are so good that at times you wish that a song would come by to relieve you of the rubbing in that the audience is being subjected to. And that is why I feel it's very difficult for this movie to be a big hit. But I would love to be proved wrong. It's the kind of movie that Gowariker couldn't have made with a big star in the lead or couldn't have sold to distributors if he didn't have Lagaan on his resume. There are some other issues like run-of-the-mill cinematography but I think they aren't really important here. What we have here is competent enough.

On the whole I would say that the plus points far outweigh the negatives. It's no classic (and I consider Lagaan a classic) but probably the best Hindi movie that we've had this year. I say probably only because I am not in the mood to recall the names of other movies released this year. So please go and see the movie, and if possible in a hall. Movies like these should do well. Movies like these should be tax-free. Movies like these should be made more often.