Here’s a thing about Aamir
Khan. He, either accidentally or by
design, manages to bring attention to things that most people merely pay lip service to. Lagaan changed our outlook
towards Oscars, Rang De renewed our sense of civic justice and Ghajini made
Christopher Nolan more famous in Tohana than Dark Knight ever could. Though I
don’t fully agree with his remarks last week, I hope they prove to be a similar catalyst
in contextualizing what ‘intolerance’ really means to the average
Indian. What defines tolerance? Do we have a unit to measure it with? Also, if intolerance is increasing – as felt by Aamir Khan – how do you gauge its incremental value over time? Can you use time series analysis or apply Tableau storyboard to visualize any marked changes in the last 7-8 months? That’s probably a topic for another day or the premise of Satyamev Jayate’s next season premier.
I just want to touch upon this issue from two aspects: the idea of intolerance in India and its correlation with time. While our tolerance level towards some of the most contemptible and regressive behavior has surpassed Gandhian proportions, we tend to generously save our disgust for all the hapless people, places, animals and things.
Let’s see some of the use cases for the benevolent Indian tolerance. In last 30 years, our threshold for corruption in public office has risen from a minuscule 67 Cr (Bofors) to an excel-crashing figure of 1.76 L Cr (2G). A few weeks back, we voted to bring back to power an illiterate man, who was just convicted in a 20-year-old scam for embezzling funds originally meant to purchase fodder in Bihar, India’s poorest state. This man, in his previous stint as the chief minister, used to run an official kidnapping/extortion racket in his beloved state. We have absolutely no issues with giving him a second chance in Bihar with that thumping victory. Far from being persona non-grata, our man was throughout the darling of the English media, which treated him the same way Abbas-Mustan treats Johnny Liver in his films – a comic relief for their audience. This in my view is the living testimony of our tolerance and forgiveness.
We are also extremely tolerant of cricketers involved in match fixing, especially an ex-cricketer who was found guilty of fixing while captaining the Indian cricket team in the 90s. Yes, ‘leading from the front’ means different things to different people. What did we do after he was caught? Far from sending him to jail (apparently there was no anti-match fixing law back then), we conveniently banned him from playing cricket for life and turned him into a martyr. Then we elected him as Member of Parliament and now making a Bollywood biopic on his life. The tolerance bar goes up a few notches when you see Emran Hashmi of all people enacting him on screen and the fact that people will throng to theaters to watch him making a complete mockery of the leg-glance. Quite a show of tolerance I say in a country where cricket is supposedly a religion.
Moving ahead, I would say we also have immense tolerance for a regressive Sharia law that deprives a 62-year-old divorced Muslim woman of basic maintenance that she’s entitled to from her ex-husband. Can’t think of any other modern democracy that allows its citizens the flexibility of choosing between two sets of laws as per convenience.
While we encourage freedom of expression and creativity by allowing Sajid Khan school of cinema (for over-grown kids and other deranged people) to blossom but we stop the release of an Oscar-worthy, hard-hitting indie film (Black Friday) about India’s first terror attacks lest the perpetrators lose out on a fair trial.
This idea of tolerance in India has a Dr Jackle/Mr. Hyde angle to it. One seamlessly blends into the other. It’s like watching the Insaaf trilogy below. You don’t know where one film ends and the other starts. You actually don't care as long as some 'Insaaf' is being down somewhere. They're all the same. And they're all damn good.
Let me now come to my second point – how this weird idea of tolerance has evolved over time? Sticking with movie analogy, I will pick up Mughal-e-Azam. Considered a jewel of Indian cinema, Mughal-e-Azam was first released in 1960. It showed Akbar, the Mughal emperor, married to Jodha Bai, a Rajput princess (a warrior Hindu class), only reiterating what was taught to us in our school history textbooks. Nothing different here. Fast forward to 2008, when its intellectually malnourished version ‘Jodha-Akbar’ hit the screens and ran straight into legal troubles. A certain community thought it misrepresented history. A history that was never challenged all these years was suddenly found offensive. Releasing around the same time, the little known ‘Billu Barber’ had to cut down the ‘barber’ from its title because a subsection of professional barbers was offended and sued the film producer. Their charge was that they found the word ‘barber’ insulting. They wanted to be called ‘hair-stylists’.
Given our fast growing tendency to take offense to just about anything, I’m pretty sure that if Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron were to be released today, the epic Mahabharat scene in the climax would be sent to gallows. Frankly, it could be any random reason: someone decides on behalf of the whole country that you shouldn’t be laughing because cheer-haran is not a laughing matter; someone else would feel that it’s dangerous to transport Akbar & Salim in Pandav’s court and violate the space-time continuum. I am not even ruling out a ban to stop visually disturbing images of Draupadi’s chest hair.
It is not to say that creative freedom of speech has suddenly been curtailed. I recently came to know that the legendary Kishore Kumar was banned from national radio in 1975 after he refused to sing at an Indira Gandhi rally. I can’t see any of the Khans being meted out such a treatment today. The point is that we are who we are, irrespective of the government. If you still don’t believe me, click here for the earth-shattering breaking news that will forever change the way you have marital discourse at home.
Every society has varying levels of tolerance for different things. While you can speak your mind on religion and get away in the West, your remarks on issues such as racism and sexism would elicit far stronger rebuke. For the US and largely the West, these are issues with far greater relevance in today’s time and age and hence, it has rightly chosen a relatively low tolerance threshold to deal with them.
India needs to choose what is relevant for it in the 21st century and, more importantly, stick to it. If cow is a sacred animal, then stealing its fodder should be blasphemous too. If beef is sacrosanct then exporting it commercially should be sacrilegious too. Also, if cow is like your mother then why treat the poor buffalo in such a step-motherly fashion? It almost reeks of outright racism going all the way back to Rig Vedas.
Finally, the irony of this whole issue can’t be captured better than seeing the tolerance debate being moderated by the guy who happens to be the most intolerant person in the living history of Primetime television.
Here’s leaving you with an intolerance box plot – an MBA’s attempt to capture the social problem with statistical tools.
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Jai Hind!
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