Khan, coined ‘A National Treasure’ by actor John Abraham (who isn’t a national treasure but is handsome enough to be near one), has won ‘it’. Whatever ‘it’ is. An amalgamation of crores, people’s hearts, the collective idea of decency, love, articulation, NRI-swooning, middle-class urban hope and mass entertainment over divisive hate politics. Which I’m sure his sporty ambitious nature, often on display through his cricket team’s ups and downs, would be elated by.
Very rarely is art about winning or losing – it is often about the grey area of emotional subjectivity -until a national treasure shows up, makes it sport, and wins it. For all of us.
Which seems like a good time to think about the #BoycottBollywood movement. Which, if we are lucky, will be remembered like revolving restaurants, handlebar moustaches, safari suits, breakdancing, neon shoelaces in a sort of ‘What the hell were we thinking?’ throwback. Now, as a caveat, I don’t mean #BoycottBollywood amounting to people choosing to stay home to watch movies because they are cheaper than watching them at a multiplex while spending thousands on stale popcorn and parking. I mean the collective that took to Twitter to berate the joy of the theatrical cinematic experience just because they had an issue with a creator’s politics.
The entire thing, an exercise in profound idiocy, can be explained in a conversation I had with an uncle while watching a movie.
‘I don’t like Aamir Khan‘s views’.
‘What does that have to do with what we are watching? He’s a wrestler.”He’s a good wrestler.’
‘Then why don’t you just watch the wrestling character he’s playing in a made-up story he’s done to entertain you. He’s not your friend. Why do you care about his politics?’
‘He said things I don’t agree with. I won’t watch his movies’
‘In his movies, he’s also played an alien who has views. You realise he’s not actually an alien right?’
‘He should leave India’.
‘What’s your favorite movie?’
‘Three Idiots’.
Denying oneself the pleasure of great cinema – one of India’s few escapist pleasures – just because an actor may have certain views in his personal life unrelated to the entertainment, is like arresting Amrish Puri because he played Mogambo, the anti-India super-villain.
The lessons for the success of Pathan are simple:
- Bollywood cinema is very much a part of who we are, and organised mobs making it risky to get to the theatre isn’t going to change that.
- Actors’ opinions shouldn’t really be taken seriously or at all. This is a profession where the person’s entire self-worth comes from fictitious lines of dialogue written for him or her.
- The Indian media, which spend hours speculating a star’s private intrigues or personal politics, are entirely dispensable and irrelevant, to a film’s fate.
- The equation is simple: Bollywood makes movies to entertain the public. Go watch — be entertained or hate it – then go home. Everything else is noise.
If #BoycottBollywood had succeeded, imagine a world without mass entertainment Indian cinema. Then imagine a wedding, an offsite, a family gathering where we have no new songs to sing, dances to dance to, or stars to gossip about. We, the retail public, would be left with each other for entertainment, with some ‘talented’ friend or relative displaying their original talents that we’d have to praise under duress. No one wants to live in that world.
So, thank you Shah Rukh Khan.
