Yesterday, while coming back from Pune, I had to sit through a grueling torure… I had to watch a total no-brainer movie called, “Mujhs Kuch Kehna Hai”. While watching the movie, I could not help, but start thinking about the strange amount of Iconisms that we Indians believe in!
Everything for us is represented as some sort of an Icon. We as Indians have started to revere and respect these icons, but have totally forgotten the very meaning of them all.
For example, we respect the Idols of our Gods and Goddesses. Yet, we never give a second thought to the meaning of the God’s image, the compassion, the knowledge and a lot other symbolic meaning that was to be portrayed by the idol.
We have so many leaders and their statues dotting at every corner on the cities roads. The ones that command the most respect / demand are that of Gandhi and Ambedkar. People like Mayawati have been playing on the psyche of the greatness of the people, by installing hundreds of statues of Ambedkar, a champion of the oppressed. Yet, the people today, only care about the number of statues and the place to install new statues. Never do they even give a thought of the teachings or the guidance given by Ambedkar or for that matter, any leader. Reading and understanding takes time and intelligence. Installing an icon, is very easy and needs no brain, but earns votes!
Similarly, the Kakhi dress that our netas adorn themselves with! Khaki was supposed to be symbol of the self-reliance of the Indians. Today, it has come to represent the ubiquitous dress of the disgusting, demeaning, morality challenged and principally corrupt politicians! Still, the rational beings of the nation are overshadowed by the people who have given up the difficult process of thinking. They just shrug the sholders on seeing another neta violating the sacred symbol.
Coming back to the movie, the heroine was a symbol of the Indian Culture. It is always depicted as such a colorful, so very cheerful and sacred in every movie that I can think of. The heroine has to be a beautiful girl, disciplined and totally selfless. This selflessness is often at the cost of losing out her self-respect. She’s almost always shown as a girl, who is always weak and dependant on the hero. The heroine’s only motive in life is to become the lady love of the hero. This is her career. Her end. What happens to this ravishing, fun and frolicking person is never shown. Why is it that we are so hypocritical? Why do we not show, that after marriage, the heroine literally has no existence of her own? The so-called ominous and omni-potent hero dictates her choice, her lifestyle, her wishes, her passions and her very reason to live. We talk of equality of gender. Yet, shamelessly we watch such trash of movies. We cheer it and set the heroines as examples to the girls. Then, when the human resource index is released, we sit and wonder what went wrong!
The movie had one more pedestrian symbol of Love. Forgettting that we are the nation that gave the world the Taj Mahal, here in the movie, we see a real mockery of this wonderful emotion. The guy sees a girl and falls in love. Her sister probes him, asking him, if he is in love or is it just infatuation. He says, he can’t live without her. He can’t concentrate on studies (he’s already been a failure for the past two years). He can’t do anything… But, he was not living as a human even before he fell in love. He was a failure in studies before too. He was not doing anything worthwhile before he fell in love. So, what’s the difference between his previous life and the new love filled life? I really wonder.
The heroine on the other hand is shown as an intelligent girl, involved in a Phd research on Indian Culture. Strangely, her thesis is restricted to the saccharine sweet traditions, like the Diwali and all. Never does she probe into the violence in the name of the marriage in the form of Dowry, or the repressive culture that brands a widow as a witch. Her whole character seems to be so very hollow, that you can literally see through her. On top it, she is shown as falling in love with a guy, who has no ambitions, who has no goal in life, who does not know the meaning of his existence. His knowledge of girls is restricted to them as being made only to be object of some else’s love, passion and most importantly compassion.
God, all this was so sickening that I was feeling like just getting out and walking out of the bus! Yet, I could not do that coz, I was sure that I’d then be on another bus. There too the driver would play some such movie. The problem is not with the movie itself, I guess. It is the culture that has stagnated and has stopped using its collective intelligence. Maybe, people are too consumed by the sloth that the inertia of non-thinking has brought about. It is after all a very painful process to think rationally and act on it.
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