PK: Why the controversy will not affect Aamir Khan

In JK Rowling's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, there's a particular incident where Harry pours his heart out about his run-in with Voldemort to a magazine that enjoyed scant respect in the wizard world. Harry turned to The Quibbler solely because no other Ministry of Magic-authorised publication would publish his view of Voldemort. So, Dolores Jane Umbridge, the nasty ministry personnel who is placed in Hogwarts to spy on Harry and Dumbledore, decides to ban The Quibbler. From the book:

BY ORDER OF THE HIGH INQUISITOR OF HOGWARTS Any student found in possession of the magazine The Quibbler will be expelled. The above is in accordance with Educational Decree Number Twenty-seven. Signed: Dolores Jane Umbridge, High Inquisitor

For some reason, every time Hermione caught sight of one of these signs she beamed with pleasure.

"What exactly are you so happy about?" Harry asked her.

"Oh, Harry, don't you see?" Hermione breathed. "If she could have done one thing to make absolutely sure that every single person in this school will read your interview, it was banning it!"

And it seemed that Hermione was quite right. By the end of the day, though Harry had not seen so much as a corner of The Quibbler anywhere in the school, the whole place seemed to be quoting the interview to each other. 

Such seems the case with the film PK, too. It released on December 19, 2014, and more than a week after the country has spent days and nights discussing and debating the film, some people who have taken offence to certain things in the film, have sought a ban on it. Now. After Rajkumar Hirani and Aamir Khan and the team of PK are enjoying the fruits of their labour - an amount of Rs 236 crores, just from the Indian audience. So, in its second week now, the film has been awarded a fresh lease of life, thanks to the controversy surrounding it. While many people are going bonkers thinking about the repercussions of the ban, Aamir and the makers of the film have trashed the reasons a ban on the film is being sought. And at this point, one can't help but wonder, exactly to what extent Aamir will be affected by the storm.

This is not really this Khan's first brush with controversy. Time and again, his films have faced ire of certain outfits, but Aamir has mostly remained unfazed. In an interview in December 2007, Khan had said, "I have always been quite headstrong. When I am clear that I want to do something, I don't look at the practical side of it. I don't care how safe it is. But that's how I have been." In yet another interview, the actor had said, "... sometimes I feel that the kind of work I have done isn't always seen for what it amounts to. I've swum against the tide my entire career. I can't think of anyone else who has done it so consistently, and for so long, and so successfully. I think somewhere, in all the stories (that are written about him), that has been overlooked all this while." (Uncut: Understanding the Minds of the Khans, by Anshul Chaturvedi).

Aamir, all his stardom aside, has been one actor in the industry who has not been too bothered by controversies surrounding his films. Be it a Rang De Basanti, or a Fanaa, or a Mangal Pandey: The Rising, whenever a film of the actor's has raised eyebrows from some conservative faction or the other, Aamir has chosen to stick to the sane person's way: by either trying to reason with those who ban, or else maintaining his silence and ignoring them altogether. And it has mostly earned, apart from the publicity that every controversy a film gets gifted with, a certain decent reputation for the actor.

This, however, might have acted as a double-edged sword, as far as the current scenario is concerned. Aamir's dignified responses or silences while dealing with a ban or a controversy that he is the subject of, is now being used against him, or so a person tracking the journey of films that bash religious men in the recent past would come to understand. A film like OMG: Oh My God!, which starred Akshay Kumar and Paresh Rawal, despite having a somewhat similar message as PK, passed by without stirring the controversy cauldron. We did not hear searing screams of "ban the film" back then, and not many theatres playing the film were vandalised, either.

Apart from Aamir's general image, he is a Muslim, crusading against Hindu gods and goddesses in the film. That is what the main problem is. However, the basic point that the filmmakers and Aamir have been trying to make ever since the film landed in this controversy, is that 99 per cent of the people associated with the film are Hindus. Including Rajkumar Hirani, the director, Vidhu Vinod Chopra and Siddharth Roy Kapur, the producers, and Abhijat Joshi, the co-writer. This, however, should make no difference to the ones screaming their lungs out for a ban on the film, because, you see, it doesn't matter what is logical. What matters, is the topicality. So, when one wolf begins howling in one corner of the country, others join him in hordes.

So, while stones are pelted at theatres running PK, and posters of the film are being torn apart everywhere, there's just one thing that is being ensured in the melee: that PK, if not banned, enjoys a good profit in its third week, too. Even if the film is banned, the ban-seekers can hardly come up with a method to stop a form of mass media from reaching the masses - at least in this age of pirated movies and DVDs and the internet. And like that reference to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix that I began this piece with, the one thing that will make sure that even people who never wanted to watch PK in the first place, will do so now, is the controversy. Just to be aware of what the brouhaha is all about, if not anything else.

As for Aamir - and I quote an interview from the same book that I've earlier done - he'll most probably just wait and watch. Because for the actor, the meaning of courage is, "To know that you are probably going towards doom, but you still go ahead and do it, because you believe that it ought to be done."