The year 2009 has been an annus horribilis for commercial Indian cinema and Bollywood in particular. According to entertainment industry analysts, against the norm of 85 percent of feature films produced annually by the brain-dead badshahs of Bollywood flopping at the box office, this year the percentage is 95. In this calendar year the aggregate loss suffered by Bollywood film producers is all set to cross the Rs.1,000 crore landmark.
Yet with hastily patched together films boasting huge budgets of Rs.30-100 crore and featuring hams who demand — and get — Rs.2-30 crore for indulging in the absurd capers and song-and-dance staples of commercial Indian cinema, being released week after week, the sources of Bollywood’s perennial money supply need to be thoroughly investigated. It’s painfully obvious that thousands of crores of slush funds generated by the country’s crooked politicians and crime syndicates are pouring into commercial cinema to fund the succession of over-the-top plagiarised Bollywood flops.
To any intelligent analyst of Indian commercial cinema, it’s obvious that the IQ of the over-hyped producers, directors, scriptwriters and actors involved with the world’s largest movie industry is near rock bottom. In particular they seem to have little awareness of market segmentation. If they did they wouldn’t churn out films with absurd titles such as Tarara Rum Pum Pum, Dan Dhana Dhan and Blue. And given the minimal attention to storyline and scriptwriters, which seems to be the norm in Bollywood and its regional clones, it’s plain as a pikestaff that the badshahs of Bollywood have yet to learn the new grammar of 21st century film production. Little wonder that interest in paying to watch ‘fair’ Central Asian looking stars pretending to be Americans while emoting in Hindi, is waning fast and Bollywood’s annual loss is set to cross the Rs.1,000 crore milestone.
Bubble-head icons
With contemporary India boasting the world’s youngest population — 550 million Indians are below 34 years of age — it’s become politically correct, indeed mandatory, for the intelligentsia and media in particular to sing paeans of praise about India’s youth. Yet the inconvenient truth is that a substantial even if not overwhelming majority of them have been transformed into volatile, amoral lumpen elements ready to riot, affray and breach the law on the slightest provocation. A major share of the blame for transforming the nation’s youth into a national liability should be attributed to the mixed-up morality of India’s socialist dispensation which has run this ancient civilisation’s morality codes (and education system) into the ground.
This observation is particularly true of the 200 million-strong middle class India, arguably the sole beneficiaries of Indian independence. Raised on a plethora of unmerited subsidies and with an exaggerated sense of entitlement, contemporary middle class youth who tend to be vocationally rather than educationally qualified, are perhaps the most self-centred, cynical and unidealistic phalanx of inheritors in Indian history. Moreover the new youth-worshipping page 3 culture of the media has blown up the peripheral attainments of arbitrarily selected bratpack achievers into such proportions that not a few of them believe they are the truly anointed.
Recently your greying editor had encounters of the forgetable kind with two page 3 personalities which provided a telling insight into the manners deficit and abysmal lifestyle skills of genext icons. Rajiv Samant is the celebrated promoter-CEO of a corporate (Sula Wines) which manages vineyards and presses grapes to produce bottled wines. During a 30 minute I-me-myself conversation following polite enquiries about his business legerdemain, not once did he enquire about your correspondent’s business or activities, which are arguably of greater national import than grape dancing. Ditto a briefer conversation with culinary entrepreneur A.D. Singh who has won great encomiums within certain epicurean communities for promoting the Olive chain of stingingly expensive restaurants across the country.
It’s a sign of the times that such bubble-head icons grabbing scarce credit for marginal economic activity have begun to actually believe page 3 hype that they are the leaders of 21st century India. Which may be good for their self-esteem but bad news for India.
Thackeray’s Waterloo?
The new war of words which has broken out between the media and the Mumbai-based Shiv Sena — a family-run mafia masquerading as a political party which has been running riot in India’s commercial capital for over four decades — following the vandalism of the Mumbai and Pune offices of television news channels, may well prove to be the last hurrah of the Shiv Sena led by its enfeebled former cartoonist, octogenarian leader, Bal Thackeray.
Mind you this not the first time that Shiv Sena goons at the obvious behest of Thackeray, his son Uddhav and nephew Raj (who split with the Sena to promote his equally fascist, parochial and violent Maharashtra Navnirman Sena in 2006) have vandalised media offices, attacking journalists and editors. But this time around Thackeray pere et fils, struggling to repair the damage inflicted upon the Shiv Sena by nephew Raj’s MNS in the recent (October) state assembly elections, may have bitten off more than they can chew.
For one, it has taken on the television media which has the natural advantage of graphically and repeatedly airing the Sena goons’ dastardly deeds on 24x7 news channels. Moreover the Sena supremo has aroused the ire of the Maharashtra public by criticising the state’s and India’s pride, cricket star Sachin Tendulkar.
But though some second rung Shiv Sena leaders may be arrested this time around, the Thackerays are likely to escape prosecution yet again. Even in the highest reaches of the country’s over-hyped independent judiciary, there is fear of Sena lumpens and supari (contract) killers. Following the horrific 1992-93 anti-Muslim riots in Mumbai, together with former state chief secretary, the late J.B. D’Souza, your editor filed a writ petition in the Bombay high court praying for an order of court directing the Maharashtra government to prosecute Thackeray under s.153 and other provisions of the Indian penal code. After great delay the high court admitted and peremptorily dismissed the petition. Ditto when an appeal was made to the Supreme Court. One hopes not, but history may well repeat itself.