After all, the first real sign of conflict comes in the penultimate scene, and is answered with that montage and little action other than Rajaram getting slapped and looking glum. But if Jaiswal is a master of "Show, don't tell" - especially in the sequences involving Rajaram writing, with some great, if fairly adolescent, visual gags - he mucks up that other film maxim: "Conflict, action, resolution". In fact, that final montage is a nice stand-in for what a lesser director would have shot a furious monologue instead. It's not so much that Mastram has an unsatisfactory ending. But the film not only fails to depict a time goes by, it also fails to transcend the realm of inoffensive fluff. After all, the Mastram books and their reclusive author were a cultural phenomenon, and there is much cinematic gold to be mined from how Rajaram found himself made obsolete by writers who substituted felicity of prose with more orgasms.
Therein, however, lies the problem with what could have been a stellar film. But Rajaram's triumph comes in the final montage, as we see shots of people all over the country breathlessly turning the pages of the latest Mastram book. Even the baniya refuses to serve him anymore. Once the denizens of Rajaram's sleepy Himachal town find out that he is indeed the author, they shun him. That although we have the second-largest population in the world, notions of sexual expression are considered a Western corruption of our great and ancient culture. It is this hypocrisy about sex that is the film's central message, if there is one: the idea that even though our society looks down upon erotica and the people who create and sell it, we consume it in record numbers.
She makes him promise not to tell her husband, since he's so straitlaced about these things. (Rajaram replies, with the sagacity period films frequently ascribes to their protagonists, that a day will come when one wouldn't need to read and write erotica in secret.) He walks out and finds the baniya's wife chasing her son because she found him reading one in the loo. The baniya tells him not to tell his family about his reading habits.
He finds the proprietor reading one of his cheap erotic paperbacks, which took the country by storm and is considered responsible for the sexual awakening of an entire generation of Indian males. At one point in Akhilesh Jaiswal's Mastram, our hero Rajaram, a bank employee with literary leanings who's found it easier to get himself published if he writes about "the masala of life" - under a fake name, of course - goes to the neighbourhood baniya's shop to get some groceries.
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