#InternationalMensDay: Mard ko dard nahin hota, and other lies that Bollywood taught us
“Girls cannot play basketball. Ladkiyaan basketball nahin khel sakti.”
The teases and taunts percolated through the air as Anjali stood there, dumbstruck. Rahul had a slight grin forming at the corner of his lips, for he’d just won a game of basketball against Anjali.
Of course, losing one game doesn’t automatically prove that all women are terrible athletes, but then, Bollywood is full of such clichés and more.
And we’ve been fighting that. When Saif Ali Khan fell for the ‘socially acceptable’ girl instead of the wild child Deepika Padukone in Cocktail. When Kajol’s eternally unrequited love for Shah Rukh Khan, a proven opportunist in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, enthralled us. Even when the recent Thugs Of Hindostan reduced Fatima Sana Shaikh, their only strong female character, to a weeping caricature of a warrior.
But the extreme opposite end of this women-belittling spectrum is equally problematic.
That’s the part where men are expected to be macho — all the time. And Bollywood takes this stereotype as seriously as they take the other one.
Men can’t cry, they feel no pain, they are strong and never vulnerable...doesn’t this reduce men to a block of concrete than a being of flesh and blood?
But hey, that’s Bollywood for you.
We look at some iconic filmi dialogues, popularised through the decades, and how they’ve shaped (read: deformed) the concept of masculinity.
Mard ko dard nahin hota / Mard
Almost reduced to a joke now, this dialogue ruined it for all of us, men and women, forever. No, I’m not saying hit a man in the nose and ask him if he felt any pain, but at what point did being a man equate to being superhuman?
Koi aurat hokar bhi bandook utha leti hai ... aur koi mard hokar bhi chudiyan pehen leta hai / Khoon Pasina
If you think the first half of the dialogue is empowering, you’ve basically fallen into the trap called patriarchy. Bandook = strength; chudiyan = weakness.
So if a woman wields a gun, she is masculine, but when a man doesn’t, it makes him a wuss. Wow!
Badalne waali hum cheez nahi ... arre hum mard hai, koi kameez nahi / Tahalka
To say that men are incapable of change, even if proven wrong, is to not only question humanity, but basically throw judicial laws out the window, too. Let’s give men the scope to change if they want to. Let’s not scare them, with such poetic verses, that masculinity = rigidity. Forever.
Ek mard ka sir sirf teen aurton ke saamne jhukta hai / Kuch Kuch Hota Hai
So basically if you treat women who’re not fictional goddesses, your mom, or your wife with respect, you’re not even a man. Because real men only bow before three women. No, guys. It’s an attribute to be respectful towards all human beings — men, women, everyone. Don’t make it conditional.
Aap purush hi nahin... mahapurush hain / Andaz Apna Apna
The fact that this dialogue still makes us giggle is proof of how skewed our understanding of masculinity is. The pause before mahapurush says it all. Because anything less than a purush is a gaali, and anything above that can only be a mahapurush.
Also read: Winter is here: Easing into the chill season with snowy Bollywood