Rant

[It’s 1:29 AM. Sleep seems elusive. Social media is hardly ‘social’ anymore. Movies and tv shows are formulaic. They all fit some pattern or another. Thus, nothing to fall back upon, I am here to rant! Maybe a futile attempt to kill time. Following should be taken strictly in that spirit.]

(A)

Sometimes, it feels like people have too much freedom of expression. Before you label me as a harbinger of some sort of dictatorship, hear me out!  Every Tom, Dick and Harry is on social media. Everyone feels entitled to express whatever they feel like. What audacity! Everyone trying so very hard to project themselves as the superior ones. Everyone preaching. Everyone exposing. Everyone ‘cooking’ everyone. Everyone “mogging” everyone. No one listening. Everyone just has to have the last word.

The mania to express is widespread. The humility to first educate oneself is so dearly missing.

(B)

Needless to say that the political class has failed us in so many aspects. After decades of disappointment one would expect that a new brand of politics emerges. Politics of today, whether new or not, is definitely weird. Every political opinion is tagged with some label or another. You can be either a ‘bhakt’ or ‘anti-national’. Name-calling has taken precedence over civilised debates. Sadly, there is sense of hopelessness. People no more see their issues as result of failure of the state. Granted, that not every problem arises out of administrative debacle or failure of government’s policies. But some of very fundamental issues should have been addressed by the state. Maybe due to the aforementioned ‘hopelessness’ all issues are redundantly personal only. In one video, a supporter of the party in power, when asked about sad state of employment said that only those people who watch Reels all the time are unemployed! 

‘Divide and Rule’ is not merely a colonial antique. The scheme is still in praxis. The people are divided into different groups on basis of different layers of identity. Vote banks are cultivated. Real issues are conveniently forgotten.

(C)

Here is my problem with Dhurandhar. People seemed to love it. I am no judge of other people’s taste. But given the deal of peer pressure to watch it and hysteria around the movie I feel like explaining my position. I would concede that it is a decently crafted movie. But given the sad state of mainstream cinema in our country, I can see why this movie garnered so much admiration. As a piece of cinema I would say it introduced some new elements of story telling which appealed to so many people. The movie is unapologetic in showing aspects that had been largely unexplored in the country. More importantly, the movie rides on emotion of patriotism, something that we hold so dear. Moreover, all the machoism displayed by its characters with beefed-up biceps holding cigarettes with swag engaging in unabashed violence both verbally and physically, did work in its favour. 

What gets my goat is the fact that the movie, not so subtly, claims to be inspired by real incidents. In fact, the canonical events in the plot of the movie really do mimic very closely some very unfortunate episodes of external aggression in recent past of our nation. The protagonist, on an undercover mission, not only avenges such atrocities but also preempts diabolical plans hatched by the enemy. He does all this in  super-humanly way. 

It can’t be denied that there truly are people who risk their lives in safeguarding and advancing our national interest on foreign soil. But it’s foolish to imagine their ways to be even remotely similar to that of Hamza Ali Ansari.  The ‘swag’ carried by the protagonist is utterly cheap. The dialogues are nothing but examples of lazy writing. What the audience was really attracted to was simply shock value effected by meticulous choreography. 

The movie does not really recognise the real heroes who go on about their work in much more mundane yet incredibly brave manner. Dhurandhar, after all, is just a commercial cinema which cleverly evokes the feeling of patriotism and gives some sense of vindication to a people with troubled past. The movie’s success was in appealing to fantasy of each individual in the audience. The fantasy of Rambo-ing our way through enemy gates and shooting and killing away the villains on the other side of border.