KAB TAK BACHCHAN...??!!

I had been thinking of trying out blogging for quite some time but the tough part was to decide exactly what I wanted to write on! Not sure what my blog would represent, I kept procrastinating till I found a suitable issue to dedicate my limited writing talents to, lest I come across an absolute urge to write about something. Well looks like I have finally found one. Just like our newspapers and news channels have nothing important and meaningful to show, I think it’s perfectly natural for me to start with something as useless, unimportant and immaterial piece of fluff as the recent Bachchan-Modi saga that was unfolding in a bizarre manner on almost every channel last night. Come to think of it, I wonder if we are a real mature civil society; mature enough to tell our ruling national party to shut up if it has nothing better to talk about.

Leaving the moral talk aside, one wonders if there was any political prudence at all on the part of the Congress in boiling up the whole issue. Reports about Bachchan planning to invest in Gujarat real-estate and even eyeing a future BJP seat for wife Jaya, after the Amar-Mulayam rift in SP, were doing the rounds. Surely, INC could have gone about connecting the dots in a more authoritative manner than a thoughtless kneejerk reaction, linking tourism to terrorism. But the Congress think-tank should have known better. You can castigate Bachchan, dishonor him, mock him, attack him, insult him, disparage him, belittle him but you can’t avoid him or disassociate from him. Not in a country where one generation has grown up and the other has grown old watching him release their combined anger on screen for decades; where anyone who kicks ass (even pretentiously) earns himself the epithet “Amitabh Bachchan”; where standup comedians make a career out of mimicking him; where no Holi is considered complete without the sound of Rang Barse; where events of far greater importance have been either preponed or postponed to avoid running into a famous TV quiz show at prime time; where Sholay still remains a synonym for long-running-films, even after DDLJ long surpassed it in statistics. No, it is just untenable. You can’t do a Rajesh Khanna to Bachchan. The guy is omnipresent – he’s there in our conscience, sub-conscience, sub-zero conscience, sub-prime conscience, sub-prime mortgage crisis conscience…you name it, he is there! And one still can’t have enough of him. So, dissociating from Bachchan doesn’t make political sense – you are dissociating yourself from a part of the common man’s psyche. You are not alienating him but yourself. It’s like allowing your son to watch cricket but there’s a catch. He has to turn the TV off whenever Tendulkar comes on screen!
I particularly feel sorry for the two party mouthpieces – Abhishek Singhvi and Manoj Tiwari – for making their party’s ‘disassociation’ with Bachchan look more like their own disassociation with brand Bachchan. The personal touch rendered will turn its ugly head and come back to haunt them soon. From now on, all Congressmen (particularly the two spokespersons) can’t be seen in a 10 meter radius of the following products – Dabur Hajmola and Chavanprash, Parker pens, Binani Cement (either dry, semi-mixed or used form in buildings), Western Union, Himani Fast Relief, Navratna, Nerolac, Tide, Emami Boroplus, Eveready and Cadbury’s Dairy Milk… have I missed any?? Not to mention Reid & Taylor power dressings and second-hand Maruti-Versa.
Though Abhishek Manu Singhvi (probably the eldest ‘Abhishek in India; Abhishek Bachchan comes a distant second, followed by a whole generation of twenty somethings named after Aby baby) gave himself some breather (and smartly so) when he categorically left his vested interest – Big B’s films (most notably Kaalia and Sooryavansham) – out of the purview of ‘The Disassociation Act’. Sure, one doesn’t want to be embarrassed on being seen at Big B’s film premiere either!
I also extend my sympathies to Maharashtra CM Ashok Chavan. He can cry foul over his dais sharing with Bachchan at the Bandra-Worli sea link inauguration but then he can’t expect to get away with a benefit of doubt every time. As ‘The Disassociation Act’ deepens the Bachchan-Gandhi divide in days to come, Chavan will have to come clean on his share of inadvertent link-ups with Mr. Bachchan. Sooner or later the Department of Public Relations (Maharashtra) will have to come out with an ingenious explanation as to why Amitabh Bachchan played the role of underworld don Vijay Dinanath Chavan in Agneepath. The fact that he won a National Award for that film only makes matters worse!!
That’s not all. Bachchan has another ‘Chavan’ up his sleeve in the form of Dabur Chavan-prash, which is again ‘inextricably intertwined’ with the Honorable Chief Minister’s surname. Clearly, Chavan won’t have been breathing so easy if Vilasrao Deshmukh’s son wasn’t doing films today; courtesy RGV. I guess, being a humble beneficiary of Ramu's misadventures, not once but twice now, Chavan may feel obligated to help the maverick director find a new financier for his next apocalyptic film, to be shot in full-darkness this time!!
Don’t get me wrong. I am not taking potshots at Congress for attacking a seemingly politically vulnerable Bachchan. I am not a diehard Bachchan fan either. Definitely, not after the 15th re-run of Ab Tak Bachchan film festival on SetMax! I just wrote this piece wondering why would a national party @ center undertake an exercise of such futility over such a non-issue?? Still beats me honestly. Second part of my query is why, if the issue was indeed taken up by Congress, did media react in the way they did? Eventually, an issue that was best suited to the likes of IndiaTV was leapt on by the supposedly 'smarter' channels which gave it all the attention and coverage that it least deserved and ended up proving once again that we can talk and argue endlessly over any issue, no matter how trivial it is, just to prove our point - when there is none. Sadly, the viewers, on the other hand, are just hooked on to it as long as the matter revolves around a celebrity - more so, if that celebrity is Mr. Bachchan.
Now he’s by far the greatest amalgamation of an actor and a star that India has seen or produced. But why can’t we just respect that and get over him…finally after all these years? Why do we want him to explicitly state his political ideology? Isn’t his wife making her ideology clear enough? Why can’t media behave a little more responsible and shun the whole façade rather than spend the primetime debating on it? And this Bollywood first-family fetish is not just restricted to news channels but spread across the board. The Filmfare Awards don’t finish till cameras haven’t followed his family all the way to his porch to get his reaction. If KBC first brought Bachchan to our homes, Big Boss makes sure that he stays put and never leaves. Every political party wants a piece of him, in whatever capacity possible. One day he is reciting lines from Kabhi Kabhie in an election rally of Mulayam Singh, the other day you find him promoting tourism in a state run by Congress’s favorite bete noire. In between, he is apologizing to Raj Thackeray, on his wife’s behalf, for preferring to speak in Hindi in Maharashtra. Going by his own candid admission, he never refuses anyone of any favour he is capable of doing; he never has all his life. He says that he has never turned down a single film producer who has ever approached him and that he has tried to do as many films as humanly possible. You may or may not believe him, but when you see films like Gangaa Jamunaa Saraswathi and Lal Badshah in his otherwise decent filmography, you do concede that he's got a point. There’s no other justification for their presence than the fact that they probably arrived at him earlier than other more deserving projects. The point is if political parties mischievously use Bachchan’s ‘never-say-no’ dharma as a medium to communicate and as a tool to make headlines – we, the ever-in-awe couch potatoes, play a big part in shaping that trend. If we can just cut him short every time he turns up in any avatar other than an actor, we can together solve many ‘issues’ troubling Mr. Bachchan & family, and save this country enough time to take on some real problems.

If only, instead of watching AB TAK BACHCHAN, we could shout and ask, “KAB TAK BACHCHAN..??!!! #$! ¥~#@%©∑β &”