Karan Johar is a shame to the queer and film industry
Just when you think he can’t do anything worse, Karan Johar surprises you. If you thought the nadir was the pathetic sell-out video apologising for casting Pakistani actors in his film Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, think again. He has now propagated his own genetic substance, using one of the most exploitative industries in the world (the second is the one he belongs to) which is surrogacy.
Twins born from surrogacy for anyone even remotely familiar with the industry is a sign of the violence committed upon women’s bodies to produce children for people like Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, Tusshar Kapoor and now Karan Johar who value their semen so much that women’s bodies do not matter.
The first two had women behind them; the third, though single, has both his parents and the fourth has his mother whom he thanks even as he nominates her as ayah in his statement, without so much as asking her permission.
The surrogate, we are reassured, will remain in his prayers. Fat lot of good that will do for her and her ravaged body! Details of what she has been paid might have been more helpful. Not that any amount would compensate for the cost of the “warm, loving and nurturing environment” to the foetuses on her body and mind.
Karan Johar has so much money, he might easily have found a surrogate woman in Europe. Why did he not do that? Why did he not reverse the process of the exploitation of Third World women? Were his children who deserve unconditional love not worth the price?
There are millions of abandoned Indian children he might have adopted, but no. There are critiques to be made of the family as an institution, but no. Johar is insistent on remaining the poster boy of all that is wrong with the rightwing, consumerist, hypercapitalist "queer movement" of our times and predictably enough, large sections of that movement are thrilled and cheering him on.
As usual, he trots out the worst clichés about the “responsibilities” and “duties” of parenthood “unconditional love”. Only he can combine “logistics” with unconditional “love”. It is symptomatic of the unthinking quality of his mind that he is blind to the implications his own account of his childhood have on his rosy picture of children in the world.
Karan Johar is all that is wrong with the film world and the queer world. Both as producer and director, he has made the most rotten, neoliberal, homophobic films that passed off as bold films that introduced homosexuality to the film-watching public in India.
On the contrary, these films only reaffirmed the worst homophobic clichés they hold about us. As someone who has made of his homosexuality the biggest and longest-running open secret, he has done the "queer community" no favours and only made it more difficult for us.
As a savvy handler of social media, he has alternated this hideousness with superficial sob stories about how difficult his life has been. The neoliberal queer mafia has lapped it all up. This is the icing on the cake.
My only hope is that he will stick to his word and retire from public life, not make any more of his insufferable films and stick to domestic bliss in some unfindable corner of the universe.
I pity his children. The only hope is that they’ll grow up to see Kangana Ranaut on Koffee With Karan.