I had intended to make an evening of it. Pillows plumped, caramel popcorn at hand—already clinging to my fingers—and a tall glass of cucumber water on the side, as though it would wash away the sugar! I was armed, or so I thought, for what promised to be an emotional epic. The film in question was Saiyaara, a July release that, within weeks, had the box office in a tizzy. Five hundred crores and counting, they said! Trade pundits whispered about it like it were the cinematic equivalent of a blood moon. Yes, I definitely thought I ought to see what all the fuss was about.
Alas, within the first fifteen minutes, I had washed down the detox water while my fingers were wrestling with popcorn that had hardened into a sticky cement… Saiyaara begins with a young woman, full of dreams, standing on the threshold of her court marriage. A phone call from her fiancé shatters it all: he has decamped to San Francisco, and, worse, has no intention of returning. He is, he announces briskly, marrying someone else. Cue devastation. Cue collapse. Cue mother, father, wringing hands.
Our heroine does not so much recover, as fossilise. For six months she lingers, and here enters that most peculiar of props: The Diary. Patchwork cover, seemingly delicate and fragile, yet indestructible. She writes in it each day, tears pages out, weeps upon it, and it still emerges unscathed, its spine resolutely unbroken. As any writer knows, even the sturdiest notebook buckles after a month of honest use, yet this miraculous volume seems forged in the same factory that manufactures black boxes for aeroplanes. It is, I daresay, the most convincing performance in the film…
Enter the hero—though that word feels generous… He is a musician with fists for drumsticks, more inclined to bash heads than tambourines, a bundle of angst and temper tantrums better suited to a sixteen-year-old than a man in his mid-twenties. And yet, he yearns to be number one in the world. Miraculously, our diarist supplies the words, he supplies the noise, and overnight he outstrips Elvis, the Beatles, combined!
The two, inevitably, fall in love. Or rather, the script insists they do, because love is signified not by chemistry but by contract. She gazes damply at him; he scowls moodily back. Pain, the director seems to believe, is a matter of slack jaws and misty eyes. Pain, one would believe, requires nuance; here it is reduced to a perpetually wilted face. The soufflé collapses long before it leaves the oven.
And then, with a suddenness that suggests desperation in the writers’ room, dementia arrives. Our heroine, still young as a freshly penned letter, still supposedly brimming with talent, is struck by memory loss. The hero spirits her away, with parental blessing, to a seaside gazebo-shaped villa in Goa, where they loll about as if the entire coast has been cleared for their private tragedy! She then, for no apparent reason, disappears and he spends his days singing his lungs out, morphing into a rock star while in the same breath, scouring the country in her desperate search…
And he spots her while rehearsing in Wembley… It’s another story that she’s in Himachal! Talk of suspension of disbelief!
I sat back, and wondered: is this what we now accept as cinema?! Soulless spectacle dressed up as profundity?! A film that rakes in hundreds of crores without leaving behind a single quotable line, a single memorable moment?! Money, money everywhere, and not a thought to think…
And then, as if to compound my dismay, along came Aryan Khan’s much-trumpeted Netflix debut, The BADS of Bollywood. Shah Rukh Khan’s heir-beta, Gauri Khan’s son, and Karan Johar, acting as himself, all part of this glossy ongoing circus. Seven episodes of it. A fusillade of abuse, a veritable thesaurus of profanity.
The very first episode was enough to send my thumb hovering over the fast-forward button like a nervous tic. After every two words, another F. And the choicest Hindi expletives, hurled with such venom that one feared for the actors’ throats. It was not merely the frequency but the inflection. The words did not slip out naturally, as they might in a heated quarrel. They were launched, missile-like, as though the point of the scene was not to advance the story but to see how many times one could make the audience flinch.
Women cursed women, men cursed men, and everyone cursed the viewers’ eardrums. By the third episode, my plate of biscuits sat untouched, and the cup of cold milk had turned lukewarm from waiting for sense to emerge.
Fine, youngsters aren’t a convent choir; one hears such language in real life. But does realism demand saturation?! Does one truly believe that an entire generation speaks only in four-letter words and the coarsest Hindi slurs?! Or is this simply what the writers imagine will sell?! And if it does sell, if it rockets to Netflix’s Top Ten, then the darker question follows: is this indeed what we have become?!
I confess, towards the end, the series did begin to find some footing. A plot emerged, a certain credibility crept in, and one could glimpse what might have been. By then, my pillows had slumped in protest. I had settled down for cinema, not for a language lesson in abuse…
Shah Rukh Khan has, for three decades, been the beating heart of Bollywood romance, his raised arms a shorthand for love itself… Gauri Khan has carved out her own spectacular niche. Aryan’s debut, backed by the industry’s finest, could have been anything—thoughtful, daring, even genuinely provocative. Instead, it felt like a dare: how far can we push profanity before the audience pushes back?!
Meanwhile, Bobby Deol continues to stalk about with his Animal persona, a sort of growling spectre of hyper-masculinity, as though his performance in that film has welded itself permanently to his skin. And Karan Johar, ever the theatrical self, prominently pops in, reminding one that the circus is not behind the curtain but centre stage. Money is raked in, headlines are made, Top Ten lists conquered. And yet somewhere along the way, the heart has been mislaid.
And so here we are: Saiyaara, with its indestructible diary and collapsing soufflé of pain; The BADS of Bollywood, with its torrent of expletives and seven-episode marathon of rage. Both, in their own ways, are triumphs of the market. Both have audiences, both have success. But both left me, asking the same questions:
Is this truly our reflection?! Have we become so dazzled by money and spectacle, that we no longer ask for heart, for meaning, for resonance?! Or is the industry simply selling us what it imagines we want, and we, too heedless or distracted, lap it up?! Was not cinema once grand mirror, the magic lantern that lit up who we were, and who we hoped to be?!
