Bollywood whacked! Eight lessons that India's most loved industry needs to note..

Bollywood is in a mess. In a classic anti-climax of sorts, the much anticipated ‘revenge moviegoing’ that was to ensue after the pandemic, never happened. With long delayed (mega) projects finally hitting the screens & licking dust, the ruthlessness with which the audiences are rejecting mainstream Hindi cinema, has come as a surprise.

Or maybe, not so.

The whacking of Bollywood was perhaps long overdue. It just took a two-year reset for us Indians to see through what had been our most loved industry for a century. So deep was Bollywood ingrained in our popular psyche, that by some lazy cosmetic tweaking over the decades, the industry had been quietly taking us for a ride , and we were suckers enough to let them do so.

Like most Indians who grew up in the 80s & 90s, our generation had its cinema sandwiched between the anger of the Bachchan decade that preceded us & the frilly romcom decade of the Khans that was to follow. Yes, there was also Mithun Chakraborty somewhere in the middle. Or Anil Kapoor, Jackie Shroff & Govinda. And some of our ‘parallel cinema’ names like Naseeruddin Shah attempting to cross over to the mainstream. In short, like the generation before us, and the one after, we assumed that we were that generation when Bollywood had finally ‘come of age’ & where ‘content’ had finally become the ‘king’ ( or ‘queen’)

Then, the internet came along.

And the world became one small super-connected village. Once we found free access to the treasures beyond our borders, we squirmed from within, furious at the mediocrity we had been fed all along in the name of art. In no time, many iconic movies that we would once swear by, came across as embarrassing B-Grade copies. But what probably hurt me the most was the discovery that much of my favorite music was actually plagiarized. And when someone takes away the music of your youth, a part of your identity goes with it. I never quite forgave Bollywood for that.

But then I digress. Let me get back to the original purpose of this post, i.e. to examine the top 8 lessons Bollywood could learn from this bashing.

1. Entitlement - From Rajesh Khanna to Bachchan to SRK , most successful stars have, during their best patches, taken their audience for granted. And we were fine with that. After all, Bollywood stars in India are like Rock Stars in the west. We keep going back to them to get more of what hooked us in the past, as long as they fed us with the occasional novelty. However, this sense of default entitlement had reached new highs in recent years – whether it was the Salman Khan genre of cinema ( complete with his off-screen conduct) that’s insulting to the IQ of a five year old, or the OTT patriotism in recent Akhsay Kumar or John Abraham movies, & of course the pathetic attempts at humor in a David Dhawan or Sajid Khan flick, the audiences were tired of Bollywood’s lazy recycle machinery. It just took them a pause to understand this & reject them finally.
2. Lack of originality – I mentioned this before. From background music to entire movie-plots, our filmmakers have been shamelessly lifting from world cinema & serving ?remanufactured stuff ?to us in the name of first-hand products over the years. Yes, we did have our share of original makers ( Hrishikesh Mukherjee & Ramesh Sippy to Raju Hirani & Anand L Rai, to name some,?& if you don’t kill me for this – even good old RGV!), but by & large, we were given stolen, ‘inspired’ or ‘official remake’ films that kept sneaking past the filter of our sensibilities, thanks to overpowering marketing by the so-called ‘demi-Gods’ & the famous Indian entertainment vacuum that would creep up in us by every Friday. I understand that art is a subjective medium & occasional inspiration is okay. But one also needs originality to be the default rather than an exception.
3. Manipulation – Whether it’s today’s frivolous paid media campaigns & Page 3 culture that the pre-pandemic India would lap up hungrily ( Malaika Arora’s dog walking out of a gym or Kareena Kapoor’s son sitting on a potty) to the more shameless milking of human suffering disguised as profundity in the Mahesh Bhatt school of cinema for the past 30 years, the objectification & dumbing down of women in the Ekta Kapoor universe, or the expletives & vulgarities in the name of realism in?Anurag Kashyap’s world,?Bollywood filmmakers have been consistently guilty of exploiting our gullibility , our lack of critical observation & our forgiving nature. But then one day, like it happens in all markets – the customer woke up, smelled the coffee & realized that a bunch of jesters had been making fools out of them for decades.
4. Pampered into delusion – There’s this famous story?that Nehru broke down when he heard Lata Mangeshkar’s ‘Aye mere watan ke logon’. While nothing takes away Lata ji’s greatness as a singer, there are many such examples where, for decades, the earlier political regime pampered these Bollywood folks & kept them handy for deflecting popular opinion from real issues, as needed. They helped in pulling in crowds for the political leadership, and who in turn would toss the occasional freebie at them – a Padma award here, a parliament nomination there. No wonder they started taking themselves too seriously. ?What else can explain the extreme haughtiness of a mediocre lyricist like Javed Akhtar, or the fact that someone like an Aamir Khan, despite his own lack of education & his series of broken marriages, lectures us on everything from education to ethics to religion, and also takes home a Padma Bhushan ( Aamir Khan received his Padma Bhushan in 2010 & Nambi Narayanan received his in 2019. Now you do the math) ? And now we have a Ratna Pathak Shah who gives sermons on what Indian women should do & not do. ?I mean, seriously guys ?
5. Nepotism – I know, this is a topic that’s been done to death, thanks to Kangana Ranaut. Full marks to her for exposing this dirty underbelly of this industry & the entry barriers that exist for external talent. Not every guy has SRK’s luck or intellect & not every girl has Kangana’s spunk or grit. Millions of super talented youngsters never get their due chance while a Kapoor & a Roshan or a Deol & a Bhatt get dream launches, word-of-mouth publicity & who, in a self-fulfilling prophesy of sorts, strike gold sooner or later. An Abhishek Bachchan still gets work despite not giving any major successful movie in 22 years. Can you imagine this happening to an outsider? No wonder we have this talent crunch in Bollywood which people finally got fed up of. After all, how long can you tolerate a Karan Johar chat show featuring a bunch of not-so-bright individuals acting out a script while uncle Karan promotes them & his own brand. An average Indian could still bear with a Sonam Kapoor or a Shraddha Kapoor or a Shahid Kapoor or a Jahnvi Kapoor ( do you notice some pattern here ?) during easy times. But when grappling with the worst pandemic of our lifetimes, it angered moviegoers that they were so starved for choices because of the industry capital being held by a few select families.
6. Hypocrisy – Obviously one should not expect some profound authenticity from an entertainment industry. But there needs to be some baseline. Whether it’s an Aamir Khan going to ‘save the Narmada’ before his movie release, or Deepika Padukone showing up at JNU before hers, the hypocrisy of Bollywood stars is glaring & insulting to our senses. Then there’s a Farhan Akhtar who would show up ( before a release) in his affected voice, expressing his concern about the ‘plight of women’. Reminds me, have you noticed that despite all these gender-equality slogans by Bollywood, women are still mostly treated as glorified furniture or ‘item numbers’, and occasionally, depicted as oppressed sex-workers or some exploited fringe in the name of ‘content-rich’ plots ? How many Bollywood movies do you recall that had a towering personality at the centre and which was helmed by a woman ( Like say, a typical Meryl Streep role in Hollywood) ? ?The advent of social media has only amplified it, with their fake social media posts (with grammatical errors) & their overflowing emojis ( that again make way into their paid promotions in national dailies), where they voice their angst against ‘social evils’ & some mysterious ‘intolerance’ & where they go overboard with their ‘RIP’ tweets when someone dies. ?And all this while they rightfully assumed that we ( the audiences) were too distracted to see through this. Thankfully, not anymore.
7. Disrespectful – From snubbing quality regional cinema by the big Bollywood stars to treating actors from parallel cinema as lesser mortals ( remember the Bachchan era?) for years, Bollywood had, in recent decades, descended to shameless levels of disrespect towards others. Imagine the audacity of a Farah Khan when she dares to mock ?legends like Manoj Kumar, Satyajit Ray & Bimal Roy, or a Karan Johar in his usual pastime, making fun of (among others) Mohd Rafi. It’s such divine justice today that regional ( Telegu, Tamil & Kannada) cinema is now ruling the box office, while the Johars & Chopras are groping cluelessly for crumbs.
8. ‘If they can’t have bread’ – Thanks to a nation addicted to entertainment, these Bollywood stars, some of them not even educated beyond fifth grade, rose to become icons & VVIPs in the society. Over the decades, their landmark bungalows, their fleet of luxury cars, their ‘airport arrivals’ surrounded by paparazzi, bodyguards & on-duty policemen had become part of the accepted narrative in our country where some of these illiterate movie stars earn several hundred times more than the best of doctors, engineers, ?professors or CEOs. Funnily, flaunting of wealth by them actually made us put them on even higher pedestals, thus making them even wealthier. However, when the world was struggling with the pandemic, losing friends & family every other day, the heartless display of their lavish lifestyles, their ‘vacay pics’ on social media (& in some leading dailies), augmented by the VIP treatment they would be getting when they accidentally caught the virus ( remember Randhir Kapoor thanking a 5-star hospital for taking such good care of him & his ‘staff’ (who were not even infected), on a day when India had hit 4 lac cases , 4000+ deaths ?& was battling a severe shortage?of hospital beds or mere oxygen for ordinary patients?) made us say 'enough!' . All this pent up anger had to show up. And it did, when these same people came back begging for ticket sales in 2022.

Indeed, it’s about time that Bollywood does a reset. It’s an integral part of our culture & it will be a shame to see it die. Cinema is a powerful medium, not just for entertainment, but also to usher social change. We need fresh minds to take the reins of the industry & a meritocracy to prevail where the best talent gets the best breaks.

And this article in no way questions the real talent within the industry. From a Raj Kapoor to a Rishi Kapoor or an Anil Kapoor – We do have great talent that’s come from within the industry & nobody can take it away from them.

(A parting thought - Probably the untimely & unfortunate demise of Sushant Singh Rajput did to Bollywood what Sharon Tate's death had done to Hollywood. Something got permanently altered in the landscape of Hindi cinema and the exaggerated adulation towards industry insiders that the audiences had for decades, finally wore off ).