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If Bollywood remixed Kites

Seeing that Hollywood masalaman Brett Ratner has been drafted in to remix Anurag Basu's Kites, we started wondering what would happen if Bollywood's very own talent was given the opportunity to fly Basu's film, their way.

Here's an imagining of five alternate Kites:

Madhur Bhandarkar

Kite: The True Story

A sensational expose on the kite-making industry, Bhandarkar boldly spells out what most of us had only suspected -- that broken glass is used in sharpening manja, that sales spike up during Makar Sankranti and August 15 and, as Hrithik Roshan -- as Bhandarkar's National Award-nominated everyman protagonist -- learns during the climax, a wet Kite can never fly.

Illustrations: Uttam Ghosh

Ram Gopal Varma

Ram Gopal Varma Ki Patang

Abhishek Bachchan's Jai has grown up flying kites and hiring himself out to the roof with the highest bidder. On one such roof he sees an item song by Natasha, played by Nisha Kothari.

Jai starts getting distracted and losing kite-fights, while Natasha turns out to be a gangster's girl. Jai kills the guy and kidnaps Natasha, but the gangster's father goes to Sarkar for retribution.

Vishal Bhardwaj

Rang Badalte Patang

Loosely adapted from Will Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, this is a tragic and dramatic tale of star-crossed lovers.

Guddu, a manja-maker whose mother died in the rain, pretends to love Sweety, daughter of the gangster who had killed said mother.

On realising that the gangster's moll Natasha is equally cash-starved, Guddu and she go on the run with the villain's millions, forcing a long and tear-filled journey over one crazy night that ends in young death -- but decidedly refuses to go underwater.

Anurag Kashyap

High As A Kite

A sordid, visually extravagant trip through the eyes of an acid-head, Kashyap's film stars Hrithik Roshan as the letter J, presumably for junkie.

A smalltime seller of smuggled kites, J starts hallucinating about the beautiful Natasha every which way he looks.

Here enters Amit Trivedi with a kickass soundtrack to accompany striking, discordant images detailing the fall of a man following his obsessive love for an illusion.

Dibakar Banerjee

Patang Se Panga

This is a story of strange tongues, of old wine in a New Delhi bottle. A girl from Dariyaganj, a guy from Golf Links. They meet, fall in love and -- after a get-rich-quick scheme goes wrong -- go on the run.

Neither can understand the other, but love beats language and dil beats dialect as they brave paunchy hawaldars, the BRT-signal traffic, and an MP's son hellbent on revenge.