No Stars

Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. Just when I swear to myself I will never subject myself again to another round of the overlong, regressive, half-observed tripe that our cretinous film "industry" passes off as politics or romance, I go and watch Raanjhanaa.

I maintain it wasn't my fault. The critics, almost unanimously, told me it was awesome. Supposedly it had an Aam Aadmi Party clone, small-town communal tension, great one-liners. Yup, it did. But it mainly reminded me, painfully, why the Indian film industry is a blight upon this great country.

Raanjhanaa has done, at last count, Rs 70 crore worth of business at the box office, buoyed by reviews churned out in close association with the big-studio PR machine. A vanishingly small number of those reviews pointed out what should have been painfully obvious: that this is a movie that glorifies and exalts the sometimes-violent stalking of young women. So blatantly unanimous was the praise, so very faint the murmurs of dissent, that, to the eternal shame of our critical classes, the only person to address the issue head-on was Shobhaa De, who in her Mumbai Mirror column called it "seriously psychotic", and wondered why "everybody is going gaga over a movie about a demented stalker harrowing an innocent victim, and calling it a sweet love story". This is an accurate description of a movie in which the protagonist, treated as goofily adorable by the director, declares that in Uttar Pradesh, you can win a girl only two ways: either pester her till she gives in, or frighten her till she yields in terror. This is as he barges into an auto rickshaw she's travelling in and then slits his wrists in response to her horrified refusal to love him back. Ah, that Dhanush. Such a sweet, innocent romantic.

But what really got to me, and dragged this column out of me, is the response of that director, Aanand L Rai - a man who should perhaps see a therapist for many reasons, but definitely because of his creepy obsession with the letter A. Here's Rai's eloquent defense: "Has she (De) seen Varanasi, felt its pulse? ...There's a life beyond metropolises that some people who have grown up in the metros cannot understand. And I don't see the need to explain myself to them. It's different cultural breeding. In a small town pursuing a girl until she says yes is a sign of true love." An awe-inspiring blend of ignorance and arrogance; it should thus come as no surprise to you that Rai grew up not in a small town, but in middle-class Delhi. It is people like that who once glorified the caste-ridden hells that are our villages; and now they pine for the imagined purity of our small towns. Nor is Rai alone. Here's a representative reviewer, Sudhish Kamath in the supposedly progressive The Hindu: "Yet, Kundan is as selfless a lover we can realistically find today, maybe if we looked in simple small towns uncorrupted by the ideals of intellect, progress and politics."

Rai's talent is mesmerising; there is nothing that he touches that he can't ruin in seconds. Cross-religion love story? Have the Muslims kill a Sikh aspiring to the hand of one of their girls. Female self-improvement? Have the audience jeer at the heroine for refusing to fall in love with someone whose only inner life seems to be obsessing over a girl. A sexually uninhibited girl, played by Sarai Fellow Swara Bhaskar? Have her beaten, jilted, mocked and used. National integration? Have a Tamil civil servant respond only to a request conveyed in Tamil. Politics? Pretend that Jawaharlal Nehru University street theatre can be the foundation for a party that terrifies Sheila Dikshit enough to drive her to murder. Oh, and that the only reason that people are in politics is to work out their own, petty personal traumas.

I am not overly sympathetic to the Aam Aadmi Party. But I am dismayed by how they're portrayed in this movie - as a group of teenagers dressed in stylish black who are arrogant and opportunistic. In order to prove that hypocrisy is also one of his sins, one of the things Rai has his young politicians protest at India Gate is, wait for it, the treatment of women - because even an "industry" that glorifies stalking watches TV news, so there.

So glamourised is the act of protest, and brutal crackdowns, that a friend muttered that, clearly, water cannons are Mumbai's new rain dance. We laughed, but on the way out of the theatre paused, faces in palms, to contemplate the poster for Prakash Jha's Satyagraha. Yup, there they were: well-dressed Bollywood stars glamorously facing down lathis and water cannons, and up there, in the upper right-hand corner, India Gate. Pause to admire the boundless benevolence of the Indian state: we aren't allowed to gather at India Gate any more, but the "industry" can film their ersatz protests there. No wonder the list of acknowledgements of Raanjhanaa, which features policemen conspiring to kill protestors, is spilling over with Superintendents of Police.

I am told Raanjhanaa may not even be the worst offender of its kind. But that movies like this one are critical and commercial successes is just depressing. Fourth-rate directors working with third-rate stories basking in first-rate praise. No wonder we're a second-rate culture. Until we stand up and shout that our pop culture, especially our film "industry", is an incestuous, regressive cesspool of mediocrity and back-slapping, that 99 per cent of our movies are just plain bad, our "soft power" will remain the laughing-stock of the world.

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mihir.sharma@bsmail.in