Main Atal Hoon is a 2024 Hindi language biographical film directed by Ravi Jadhav and written by Rishi Virmanu. It stars Pankaj Tripathi as Former Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
The actor spares no effort to get into the skin of Vajpayee and imitating his body language and speaking style. The Mumbai movie industry rarely, if ever, does justice to biopics, be they of personalities of contemporary relevance or of figures of historical significance. Main Atal Hoon, helmed and co-written by the National Award-winning director Ravi Jadhav (Natarang, Balgandharva, Balak Palak), does little to change that widely held belief.
For a large part, it remains a wide-angle shot, tinged with unqualified adulation for the popular leader who articulated that being a liberal democrat and a Hindutva ideologue are not contradictory. It hardly gives us an insight into how the conservative mind took wing and how his worldview was shaped. It rather chooses to play safe. There is no clarity on what Vajpayee thought of Gandhi. There is no space for his good friend Sikandar Bakht or how he made friends across the political spectrum and how some of his liberal ideas found opposition within his parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
Pankaj Tripathi does his best to bring alive the magnetic persona of Vajpayee. Like the former Prime Minister, Tripathi has the oratorial skill to hold the audience in thrall. Not just his changing mood and mannerisms with age, he seamlessly reflects Vajpayee’s calm resolve and equanimity in the face of a crisis that made even his critics describe him as Teflon-coated. Curiously, Tripathi hasn’t put on weight to depict an ageing Vajpayee but it doesn’t come in the way of his performance for the most part.
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