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I watched Ae Dil Hai Mushkil to show my support to Karan Johar

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Makarand R Paranjape
Makarand R ParanjapeNov 02, 2016 | 10:13

I watched Ae Dil Hai Mushkil to show my support to Karan Johar

I can't believe that I actually saw Ae Dil Hai Mushkil (ADHM) first day first show.

Should I be proud or embarrassed? Proud, I suppose, of the draw of Bollywood, especially the anticipation and excitement it induces.

It's another matter, though, that multiplex bourgeois audiences are so different from the raucous but earthy hoi polloi who flocked to our theatres in earlier decades.

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Nationalism

But one reason I wanted to make it early to ADHM was to resist the MNS-style bullying and muzzling of our most vibrant cultural medium.

Indian values, including nationalism and patriotism, are conveyed more effectively by Bollywood than probably any other medium.

Bollywood is not just celluloid; it is arguably the world's most alluring, if not powerful, culture industry and dream factory.

The drama spills from the screen to the streets. Even ADHM, with its lavish sets, costumes, foreign locations, music, dance, but most importantly emotional appeal, makes India attractive to the world.

It shows us as confident, open-hearted, liberal, and clearly superior to competing cultures, both in the neighbourhood and elsewhere. Why ruin this great image? Isn't that a sort of self-goal?

I can't also forget Karan Johar's shell-shocked expression as he stepped out of his black Jag after the meeting with Raj Thackeray and Maharashtra CM Devendra Fadnavis.

The latter reportedly brokered the settlement in which Karan coughed up Rs 5 crore of protection or penitence money to the Army Welfare Fund.

Such harassment has become common in India. Filmmakers or writers are routinely threatened if they do not conform to ideological or religious diktats.

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Luckily, though, the movie usually wins; publicity, good or bad, always helps sell a product. I suspect ADHM's case is no different.

But that is not quite enough; we must take strong and public exception to extra-state actors who threaten us with dire consequences if we don't kowtow to them.

They hold both the state and civil society to ransom. Political parties and elected governments must not cave in to such intimidation and extortion. Art must be protected from those who don't like what it shows.

1473919422_ae-dil-ha_110216083254.jpg
A still from Ae Dil Hai Mushkil. (Photo credit: Google)

This guarantee is as old as the Natyasastra. Remember how, displeased with the depiction of the devas defeating them in the very first play ever performed, the danavas pummelled the actors and pulverised the playhouse?

Brahma himself had to intervene, taking measures to secure the playhouse and the actors. State power, according to the Natyasastra, must grant immunity and protection to artists.

That said, what good, if any, has come of campaigns like the MNS's? For starters, whether it was SRK's My Name is Khan or Kamal Haasan's Viswaroopam, such menacing hasn't succeeded in stopping the screening of the films.

Also, it is not only "Hindu" groups such as MNS, but also "minorities" who display intolerance. Muslim groups brought Chennai to a standstill in 2012 against the Innocence of Muslims documentary.

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In 2013, again they flexed their muscles against Viswaroopam. Today, the Owaisis have taken such competitive intolerance to a new level.

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Should we therefore tolerate MNS, Ram Sene and other vigilante "Hindu" groups, extrajudicial moral policing agencies, and so on? Not at all: two wrongs do not make one right.

But what the campaign against Pakistani actors and sportspeople has shown is that it is not cool to patronise those who don't support our way of life against our hostile neighbour.

Earlier, it was fashionable to promote Pakistani celebrities in India even if the latter said nothing against the anti-India acts of their state.

That resulted in relativising and equalising of both India and Pakistan, working against our interests, that too at our expense. This will no longer be so easy.

To return to ADHM, the key to understanding, even appreciating, the film is its treatment of tedha love. In a sense, of course, all love is tedha.

The love versus friendship angle, so common in all Johar's films, is likened to junoon (obsession) versus sukoon (solace), kamzori (weakness) versus taaqat (strength).

The crooked love-sign behind which Alizeh (Anushka Sharma) takes refuge becomes the film's dominant leitmotif.

Passion

This tedha love is actually "queer" in the multiple sense of the word. The queering, thus, involves not just love versus friendship, romance versus camaraderie, or passion versus peace, but also guy versus straight, Hindu versus Muslim, man versus woman, and Indian versus Pakistani.

It is possible to see Ayan (Ranbir Kapoor) as a gay man in love with a straight woman.

At another level, the "impossible" love between Hindus and Muslims also spills across the border as a symbol of the unresolved love-hate relationship between India and Pakistan.

Each of these doomed passions involves transgressing a border, an LoC, so to speak. The solutions proposed by the film against such impossible, tedha love are friendship - or death.

Both, as the film itself acknowledges, are also inadequate, unsatisfactory. The former is not quite a love-substitute, even if as Plato himself said long back, it saves us from the pangs of heartache and heartbreak.

The latter is merely a cop out, though Karan extracts much mileage by eroticising two frolicking ganju-taklus (bald heads).

Was there a real-life subtext, as alleged by an out-of-work singer's slanderous tweet against Karan, to the film?

Was Karan actually terrified by the threatened exposure of that najaayaz (illegitimate) passion?

Whatever the answer to such questions, I bought tickets to view the film in order to stand against all those who want to police artistic and personal freedom.

To give him his due, Karan hasn't lost his touch. He is still able to wring a twinge of real emotion and a tear or two from us.

He even offers us a new love-mantra: unrequited love not as curse but cure. As a testament to his art, I offer the following line that came to me right when I was watching the film: in the mansion of emotion, there are empty rooms in which lovers take turns to wait for each another.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)

Last updated: November 02, 2016 | 10:13
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