If These Stupid Bollywood Movies Are Our Teachers, Maybe We Need A Ban!

From gravity defying heroes to bullets that choose their own trajectories, we the public, lap up everything that Bollywood gives us. Leave your brain at home indeed!

The year: 1976

The movie: Late Shashi Kapoor and Shabana Azmi starrer Fakira

Climax: The villain drowns the hero in a pond. There is no one to rescue him. The viewer gives up hope of the hero surviving. And then his friends arrive and try to find him underwater, saying, “Our friend knows yoga, he can hold his breath for half an hour”. At the 29th minute, the hero is pulled out of water and saved.

Really? The scene hurt my sensibilities as a practicing yogi(ni).

My friend told me, “Relax, it’s just a movie. Just leave your brain at home and enjoy. Cinema is for entertainment.”

If Bollywood is depicting something, it must be true, right? So how could I relax?

I immediately googled it and confirmed something that I already knew. A normal person like you or me would struggle to hold their breath underwater even for a minute. An exceptionally healthy person could hold it for between 2 to 4 minutes.

This piece of information got my goat. I wondered why Fakira was not banned. It is contrary to the known laws of science. Would it not have destroyed the foundations of scientific enquiry in our country? Mind you, the movie was a blockbuster super hit in its time.

Ii is my belief that all movies which deviate from the laws of physics, chemistry or actual history should be banned because we, the Indian movie-going public, believe what we see on the silver screen. Whether we leave our brains at home or not, we tend to believe whatever we see on the silver screen.

We should also ban all South Indian movies where bullets follow their own customized trajectory rather than the one dictated by the forces of gravity and a single bullet finds many. Don’t these hurt our sensibilities?

We should also ban all the movies where the police comes in at the very end after the hero has caught the villains. The hero tells the policemen, “Here is your criminal. Arrest him”. Does it not hurt the sensibilities of the police force? I’m sure they wonder, “Do we always reach at the end? Arre, we don’t even reach most of the times.”

I’m sure you can think of numerous examples from various Bollywood movies which have the potential to hurt with their unrealistic portrayal of characters, situations and natural phenomena.

In India, movies click and stars are born. The actors who play the part of hero and heroine respectively, beget a massive fan following. We do not realize that the actors are just projecting the characters that the writer has created and director has envisioned. Till the time we put our movie stars on a pedestal and build temples for them (Actress Khushboo’s fans had famously built a temple for her in the 90’s), we need to ban a whole lot of movies.

Actress Priyanka Chopra, who has earned laurels in Hollywood,  revealed that when she was shooting for the TV series Quantico in California, the number of Indians who turned up to watch her was far greater than the fans who turned up to watch the other actors. So much so that the other actors looked at her with awe, wondering what a big star she must be in India.

Indian fans are stupid, myself included.

I have been a crazy fan of Rajeev Bhatia, better known as Akshay Kumar since his Khiladi days. Besides his good looks and physique, I was attracted to the characters and the values he projected through his acting. When he was promoting his film, Holiday in which he plays an Indian soldier, I came to know that he had given up his Indian citizenship and gladly accepted to become a citizen of Canada. For a second, I couldn’t believe it. This country had given him so much. I felt let down.

Why? Who did I think he was?

Recently I chanced upon the video of a TV show, where he was a judge. The actor made a really vulgar comment to his co-anchor Mallika Dua. Again, I couldn’t believe my ears. And then the alienation was complete or you could say that I woke up to the reality. As a working woman, a similar comment by any colleague would be sufficient to put him in my bad books forever.  I realized that all the dialogues from his movies which had won my heart, had been written by someone else.

These bans need to be effective till the Indian public matures and realizes that art is a medium of an individuals’ expression and his interpretation. If you don’t like it or do not agree with something, don’t go and watch it. Let the film bomb at the box office.

Like other movies, I also support the ban on the movie Padmavati until the time we refer to our movies for lessons in history, geography or science.

Kaamna Jain

A journalist by education, a marketing professional by trade and a blogger by choice. A

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