Dirty Dancing

WET saris may soon be passé as Bollywood discovers it’s fun to get dirty.

Yash Chopra’s just-out production Dhoom has reinvented masti in mud. So the beefy John Abraham and Thai pop diva Tata Young slosh through the muddiest bath we’ve seen in recent times, complete with a dash of S&M.

Abraham’s brief was clear: The song—Dhoom, Dhoom, Come Light My Fire—would be divided in three stages.

With Abhishek Bachchan, Young would play coy. With Uday Chopra she would be naughty. But Abraham and the Thai sensation would hit the climax.

Even though the mud was ‘‘really slippery’’, Abraham had fun shooting. ‘‘It was like children playing in mud,’’ he declares. But which child rips off his playmate’s clothes as Abraham does with Young?

Though the clothes stayed on in Khiladiyon Ka Khiladi, the song In The Night No Control featuring Akshay Kumar and Rekha was a scorcher. The duo splashed in soil and later we got a torrid glimpse of legs in a translucent shower cubicle. Producer Keshu reminisces, ‘‘It was something new. It was choreographer Ahmed Khan’s idea and it’s nice to see that we set a precedent.’’

There was also Anil Kapoor’s mud cake avatar in Nayak, but surely Kapoor would rather forget it—it was the least aesthetic thing we’d seen in a long time.

Frankly, there is no competition between Kumar, Abraham and Kapoor. We are talking strictly about their abs.