Asif Balwa, an accused in the 2G scam, requests an iPad in jail and his appeal is granted. Will this affect iPad sales negatively or positively? My guess is the latter.
Our response to villainy has undergone a sea change in these times when each day’s news reveals more of the high and mighty having feet of clay, when those who lived in penthouses have been forced to move into repent-houses.
Don’t agree? Then just look at how the public rewards those who stray from the straight and narrow: Rappers like Eminem, Tupac and 50 Cent seem to gain fans no matter how many times they are indicted for violence, bust-ups and drug charges. “Bad girls” like Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Madonna and Lady Gaga are celebrated for their indiscretions.
And you only have to look at the way Bollywood has embraced the villain to understand that something has deeply changed in our society, that there is perhaps a maturing , perhaps a hardening, most likely an amorality, in the way we approach villainy.
Time was when few self-respecting heroes would agree to portray a “negative role”. These were left to Pran, Amrish Puri and Gulshan Grover. Today you have the superstars of Bollywood like Shah Rukh Khan playing a drunk adulterer (Devdas) and Amitabh Bachchan a ruthless underworld kingpin (Don), amongst a plethora of other such instances like Saif Ali Khan in Omkara or Abhishek Bachchan in Yuva.
And, of course, canny scriptwriters in the past made sure that the villains always got their comeuppance. So even if Sunil Dutt played a renegade son in Mother India, such was the moral high-ground of that time that it was believed that the audience would only be placated if the arc of the plot hinged on him being shot at by his own mother.
Or if in Deewar, Amitabh Bachchan essayed the role of a ruthless smuggler, his life-choice was challenged by his police officer brother with the immortal line “Mere pas Ma hain”.
Things have changed too in that other measure of popular taste, advertising. It started with Gabbar Singh endorsing a brand of biscuits and Onida making envy OK. But nothing demonstrates this trend more aptly than Surf which, after a lifetime of promising white as the driven snow, squeaky cleanliness, has now adopted the legend “Daag achche hain” (stains are good).
So when did this change occur? My reading is that ever since role models like Prince Charles and Princess Di showed us that princes and princesses do not exist in the modern world, ever since the world’s most powerful man, the president of the United States, Bill Clinton, was caught with his pants down, there’s been a rethink on our views on morality, human fallibility and grayness.
And who can blame us? When in this day of twitter, phone taps and 24X7 media scrutiny, the poster boys of civil society like Rajat Gupta and Dominic Strauss-Kahn are seen to have transgressed, what can we do but calibrate our own responses and factor in a more nuanced and less judgmental view of human nature?
Don’t agree with me? Two words: Salman Khan. With every transgression, every affront, his popularity grows bigger. Is there any coincidence that his last big hit was predicated on the song “Munni badnam Hui”? Or that his next one, Ready, slated to be an even bigger hit, has him gleefully singing “Character dhila hai”?
Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer
