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Wednesday, August 31, 2022

Bollywood Delenda Est

Shah Rukh Khan

Will Shah Rukh, the Bollywood star, condemn the heinous crime of Shahrukh, the psychopath of Jharkhand? #Shahrukh has been trending on Twitter for several days. This Twitter trend is not a propaganda; this is about a real crime. A teenaged girl belonging to a poor and powerless family, living in one of the poorest states, has been burned to death by the psychopath called Shahrukh because she refused his advances. It must be galling for Shah Rukh that a person of his religion, who bears his name, has committed this heinous crime. 

In the media Shah Rukh is eulogized as the “Baadshah of Bollywood,” "King of Bollywood" and "King Khan.” Now the Baadshah or King ought to defend the dignity of his first name. He should condemn the Shahrukh who has committed the crime. Shah Rukh and most other Bollywood stars seem too cocksure when they are criticizing the traditions of Hinduism—but they never utter a word against criminals like Shahrukh. Getting Shah Rukh to condemn Shahrukh would be a “mission impossible”: he won’t do it. The so-called Baadshah will keep mum. 

I refuse to believe that the top players in Bollywood (the Bollywoodians) have any intelligence. They are still making the same kind of demented, unpleasant, contrived, artificial, and cloying movies that they used to make in the 1980s, when India was a closed leftist society, an appendage of the erstwhile Soviet Union. Since then India has evolved by leaps, but the Bollywoodians are unevolveable fossils. 

Since the Bollywoodians despise India’s mainstream Hindu culture, they never bother to examine society closely—they are clueless about the transformations that have taken place in the last 40 years. Their ignorance leads them to believe that they can manipulate society—to a predominantly Hindu audience, they want to propagate Islamist and leftist values. Stars like Shah Rukh see themselves as social crusaders, not merely actors. The scope of their crusading is limited to the Hindu traditions; they never condemn the crimes of the likes of Shahrukh.

Shah Rukh’s movie Pathaan will be released in January 2023. My prediction: Pathaan will be a super-duper flop. I can’t imagine that there are too many people in this country who would want to waste two or three precious hours of their life on watching Shah Rukh’s demented movie. His film career is finished. The age of Bollywood cinema is finished. Bollywood delenda est—this is my version of Cato the Censor’s famous slogan.

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