Face-to-face with our hollowness... : The Tribune India

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Face-to-face with our hollowness...

I am not much of an Aamir Khan fan.

Face-to-face with our hollowness...

Illustration: Sandeep Joshi



Harish Khare

I am not much of an Aamir Khan fan. I have not watched many of his films. Only three. Sarfarosh was redeemed by the presence of the ravishing Sonali Bendre. Lagaan was too gooey for my taste. And  then there was 3 Idiots. 

The only time I have met Aamir Khan was at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s banquet for President Barack Obama at 7 Race Course Road in 2010. The guests were waiting for the President and the Prime Minister to finish their tete-a-tete. Aamir does not have a striking personality, that presence which commands everyone’s attention in a room full of achievers. 

I was introduced to Aamir Khan. I told him that the first time I heard about him was from my son, who then was five years old. My son’s ayah had taken him to a neighbour’s place and there he and three other boys had watched on the DVD player a movie called QSQT. In the evening, my son had self-importantly announced that he had watched QSQT. Totally perplexed, I asked him what it was. He knowledgeably told me it was “Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak”. He did not know what “qayamat” meant, but he did know that “Aamir” was the lead star. 

I narrated this to Aamir Khan. I gave him a left-handed compliment that 25 years later, he was still playing the young romantic hero. He did not like it. No star likes anything less than total adoration. Vanity is thy middle name. 

A few days after the Obama reception, a screening of 3 Idiots was arranged for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. It was a thoroughly enjoyable movie. It was also a thoroughly subversive flick. 

The bottomline of that movie was the de-legitimisation of one of the greatest middle class institutions: the IIT. The “aspirational Indian” was suddenly told that the very institution that had produced nation-builders for five decades was, in fact, a hollow device, an arrangement to produce an unthinking workforce. But, in a way, that is an artiste’s obligation: to question the orthodoxy. 

Nonetheless, seen in conjunction with Aamir’s earlier project Rang De Basanti, 3 Idiots instigated a process of middle class disillusionment, a process that provided the cultural backdrop for the Anna Hazare movement, which, in turn, paved the way for the rise of the Hindutva movement in May, 2014. In a way, Aamir Khan is now a victim of his own creative exuberance. 

There is something deeply disturbing about the manner in which Aamir Khan has been taken to task for sharing his wife’s loud-thinking. One erudite BJP spokesperson has even suggested that Aamir was acting out of a profit motive. It seems that ugliness is being institutionalised and we all are being invited to take joy in this practised lowness.

The crux of the matter is that very many sensitive Indians do worry about the creeping intolerance in the country. This disquiet is not on account of this or that incident. Such incidents do happen. But what has caused anxiety is the manner in which the ruling establishment sought to justify those horrific acts of violence against minorities. A number of Central ministers left every democratic soul numb and bewildered with their comments in the wake of the Dadri incident. And those ministers remain un-rebuked. 

What is curious is that while Aamir Khan is being taken to task for his wife’s half-thinking to leave the country, the new regime’s most vociferous supporters are those very group of Indians who have left the country. The non-resident Indians. No one questions their presumed lack of patriotism. For 16 months, the Prime Minister has hopped from one NRI congregation to another in different countries, generating choreographed applause from those very people who disdainfully walked out on Mother India. 

An iconic film star who has entertained millions and millions of Indians was reduced to being just a Muslim. In the process, we all have been made to feel a bit diminished and India stands reduced to a very small country. Aamir Khan has unwittingly made us come face-to-face with our own hollowness. 

Very many readers have expressed their disagreement with my observations in last week’s Kaffeeklatsch about mauli on a soldier’s wrist.

One type of reactions came from those who were apprehensive that if objections were to be raised about mauli, then a similar point could be made about Sikh officers and jawans wearing the kara.

The second type of reactions was an assertion that the Army was a very secular institution, that it had a deeply entrenched tradition of respecting and celebrating different religious festivals, and that each regiment had its own rituals, and that every soldier, irrespective of his faith, was participating in the regiment’s celebrations. So, please, do not question the mauli. 

Yet another type of reactions came from those who thought why so much was being sought to be made from this or that officer displaying a religious symbol and that such religiosity need not be in conflict with his professional commitments. And, that to raise such kind of objections was taking secularism too far. 

My basic point was and remains that an army is by definition a disciplined force. It has to be a disciplined force, subject to a rigorous code of conduct. It makes a special claim on respect and consideration from society because of this basic characteristic insistence on its members dissolving individual traits and habits in favour of a uniformed code of dress and behaviour and thinking. For more than a century, the law has permitted the Sikh soldier to wear the kara. Rules and traditions permit regiments celebrating various religious festivals. 

That is it. What is permitted is permitted. What is not permitted is a deviation in a disciplined force. And, the Indian Armed Forces are a disciplined lot. As citizens, we have a right to expect them to remain so.

Captain Amarinder Singh has at last been named president of the Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee. For all practical purposes, he gets projected as the Congress party’s chief ministerial candidate in the 2017 elections. I know him only as a military historian and admire his knowledge of military affairs and history. A battlefield tests a man’s mettle. On that count, the good Captain has no rival in Punjab. 

That the central Congress leadership took its time to nominate the Captain as the Punjab chief suggests a nuanced sense of timing. The good ‘maharaja’ has to work hard only for one year. He has in the past not shown much of a stamina for long-distance political running. If he begins a new political innings now, he should be peaking at the right time: around the Assembly elections in early 2017, if not earlier. 

However, we can be sure of one thing. From now on, Punjab will be in for a high-pitched political confrontation between a man who is deemed by many as a natural leader of men and the Badal clan, which has mastered the art of accumulating power. At times, this standoff will get unpleasant, even ugly.

In the last six months, Punjab has passed through tense days. The state’s fragility has been exposed. Anger is just beneath the surface. One only hopes that the electoral protagonists would remain mindful of their responsibility to ensure social harmony and that they would avoid flirting with religious sentiments.

The other day, a colleague told me of this ‘joke’ doing the rounds on social media. The great spinner, Harbhajan Singh, meets the great globetrotting Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. The curious man that Modi is, he asks Harbhajan Singh: “What is the secret of spin?” The ‘turbanator’ replies: “Flight.” The PM’s response: “Domestic or international?”

Amen. It’s coffee time. Ready?


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