Shiva

Remake of Ramgopal Varma's 1989 debut film in Telugu of the same name, this 1990 classic had an above average run at the box-office. RGV who did his Civil Engineering degree before turning into a video library owner, asst director and eventually a director used his experiences of his college life to make this film about college politics.

Its the story of a how a middle-class student gets sucked into college politics and eventually turns into a city don. Although the story may seem like a regular run-of-the-mill kind, its the RGV treatment that made it into a path-breaking film. The camerawork with very dull lighting, having no background music during action scenes which added to the drama and suspense and made it realistic, no make-up look for all actors and all the actors underplaying the roles and not overacting (overacting was the norm in the 80s commercial flicks) were some of the trends that were started with this movie. Ilayaraja's background music was great and a shame that there were no awards given to background music those days. Some of the great scenes in the movie that I still remember after 16 years from this movie - the very first fight scene when Nagarjuna pulls his cycle chain to beat the shit out of the college rowdy (Chakri, who went on to play Satya), the attack on the hero's friends, the cycle chase scene, the scene where Nagarjuna and his friends beat the villain's goons and drop them off at the villain's house.

Raghuvaran as the villain was sensational. Paresh Rawal in a very short role of a corrupt politician was great. Nagarjuna, Amala and Raj Zutshi played their respective roles well. This movie absolutely revolutionized the Telugu movie industry and led to many RGV clones. One possible reason this movie may not have done very well in Hindi was because it did not have any major Hindi stars in the movie and the movie may have looked like a dubbed movie. Also the Hindi movie industry was making a lot of love stories with the Khans with great music by Nadeem Shravan those days.

RGV went to make a few more movies (some great and some not so great) before he finally made it big in Hindi with Rangeela. Some of his good movies after Shiva and before Rangeela -

1. Kshana Kshanam (1991) (Telugu) with Venkatesh, Sridevi and Paresh Rawal - (dubbed very poorly into Hindi as Hairaan)

2. A Telugu-Hindi bi-lingual called Drohi (1992) in Hindi and Antham in Telugu with music by RD Burman. Starring Nagarjuna and Urmila  

3. A Telugu-Hindi bi-lingual Raat (1992) A horror film starring Revathi.

4. Produced a low-budget comedy called Money (Telugu 1993) starring Paresh Rawal, Renuka Shahane and Chakri which he remade in Hindi in 2001 as Love Ke Liye Kuch Bhi Karega. (although the Hindi version was glamorized and was made on a bigger budget).

5. Gaayam (Telugu -1993) Screenplay by Mani Ratnam - This movie was inspired from Godfather and which he again made in Hindi as Sarkar (2005) which was closer to Godfather than Mani Ratnam's script.

Tigumanshu Dhulia made a similar college-politics movie called Haasil with Jimmy Shergill which in my opinion was great but then again like Shiva it got lost in the host of glamorous movies.