AN OPINION PIECE BY SHAILYA PURI
Disclaimer – All points are written in the author’s opinion and perspective. It has no intention of hurting anyone’s sentiments.
The fact that only 40% of the films are based on reality and the “behind the scenes” of expectations. Even on top of that, Actors and directors like Anurag Kashap who shoot such films receive a big amount of hate and criticism. PadMan, a movie talking about the real issue of small town girls not having access to Pads.
Indian Film Industry [1] had started with a mute film in black and white, then dialogues were added, dance numbers were added and then finally the era with coloured films and that is how the industry evolved. Films at that time were well focused and looked at, now-a-days directors are making movies on hay-way content.
A lot of times I don’t understand why the genre horror was even introduced in Bollywood. Let’s take a couple of movies as examples. In Bhool Bhulaiyaa they are showing us that people act in a certain way just because of mental issues or if they are going through some trauma. The way Raghava Lawrence portrayed LGBTQ+ in the movie Laxmi Bomb invalid and disrespectful. In my opinion the character of Akshay Kumar has a soul of a transgender trapped inside his body. I don’t get it, it was a vilification of the trans community. JK Rowling’s tweet on the trans community caused an outrage on twitter but no one picked a finger up when it came to sir’s movie.
Talking about Bollywood and not including the word “nepotism” is for sure not possible. This word means the practice among those with power or influence of favouring relatives or friends, especially by giving them jobs. Nepotism is the reason why we have actors like Arjun Kapoor, Sonam Kapoor, Varun Dhawan, Sara Ali Khan, Jahnvi Kapoor, Ananya Pandey etc making horrible films. Many, many better actors are roaming around the streets of Mumbai waiting to get a callback while Salman Khan is adding Aayush Sharma to this mix. These are people who couldn’t make a life for themselves but are being given the biggest platform at the expense of better actors. With every theory comes exceptions, similarly actors like Farhan Akhtar, Alia Bhatt etc, bear in mind that they’re very good actors. Such people deserved the platform that they have gotten, or at least are justifying it by producing some beautiful work. Yes, it would be fair if they had to go through the struggle, but that’s not the biggest concern Bollywood has right now. It needs to make sure it doesn’t give chances to people who don’t even take this professionalism seriously. And if we remove all these bad actors (pun intended), and give that same chance to more promising talent like Rajkumar Rao, Karthik Aryan, Bhumi Pednekar etc, in my opinion Bollywood will be able to produce more diverse content.
In my opinion, its become worse as it does not show the reality of life, discriminates, and says it does not “follow nepotism” but clearly needs a reality check.
hARTS magazine 