Arnab Ray: Today, I shall tell you the story of Agent Vinod

Did you know that this Saif Ali Khan is not the first Agent Vinod… that there was someone before him?

I thought not.

The original Agent Vinod was a character in a movie called, surprise of surprise, Agent Vinod, released in 1977.

It was a landmark year for international intrigue. Times were so bad that Iftikaar, known to play the staid police commissioner who encircles the bad guys from all sides (“Police ne tumhe chaaron taraf se gher liya hai”), had gone over to the dark side. There, he was heading an international gang of intrigue, which not content with blowing up what looked suspiciously like toy-trains and doll-houses, had also hatched a sinister conspiracy which involved kidnapping great scientist Ajay Saxena (Nazir Hussain) and imprisoning him in a lair that had sharp dildos descending from the roof and, even more dangerously, lip-shaped TV screens. Why did they do this? So that they could obtain from him a secret formula, one that can negate even the effects of a Hydrogen-bomb.

And that plot would have succeeded had it not been for Agent Vinod, played with aplomb by the Daniel-Craig-look-alike Mahendra Sandhu. Do not be fooled by his cross-eyed, paunchy, hairy exterior. Do not be taken in by his cringe-inducing shayaris and the bizarre English proverbs like “Never shoot a guy who gives you a gun”.

For Agent Vinod was quite the player. He dispatched villains by spinning like a top on a revolving chair. He assaulted their arses with strategically placed cacti. He ate with chop sticks. He somersaulted from six stories up and landed perfectly on a motorcycle parked below. He seduced armies of bell-bottom-clad comely aunties, both friend and foe, with a wink and a knowing smile, which made them all “paseena paseena”. He discovered spies and moles like a bear does honey, helped perhaps mildly by the fact that the hidden bad guys all had prominent scorpion tattoos on their hands.

Nothing surprising in all this marvelousness for as his boss, the redoubtable spy-master played by KN Singh, said about the Agent: “Woh lomri ka dimaag rakhta hai aur sher ka jigar.” Even the bad men knew not to mess with him. For instance, when once one of them says “Hands up” and Agent Vinod retorts “Mera haath upar karoonga toh qayamat aa jayega”, they hesitated for a vital second, worried as to what hell might emanate from his armpits.

Does the new agent Vinod command that respect? I don’t think so. He is too busy slapping people who protest against him and his friends talking too loudly.

Agent Vinod too had great friends, without whom he would not have succeeded—from a sidekick named James Bond (played by Jagdeep) who wore the hat from Dr. Seuss’s Cat In the Hat to a fisherwoman, a Sardarji, a lady-love Anju (Asha Sachdev) and last but not least, a Sanath Jayasurya-lookalike scientist who worked in a laboratory with beakers full of chemicals which, to an untrained eye, looked like orange drink made from Rasna concentrate.

If there is any doubt left in the awesomeness of the old Agent Vinod, sample this sequence.

Anju (Asha Sachdev) uses two marks of a black pen to paint a moustache and pretends to be a man. So masterful is her disguise that even the Lomri-dimaag Agent finds it difficult to identify her as a woman, despite her rather prominent Anjus. He asks “him” “his name”. “Ram Singh” is the answer. To which he reaches forward, massages her/his thighs and says with a wink “Tumhara naam aaj se Mulayam Singh rakh lo”.

Smart. Sexy. And still politically relevant after all these years. That’s the old Agent Vinod for you. A classic.

Arnab Ray is the author of The Mine