Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi: Death of the Bollywood Romantic Hero?

Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi is no path-breaking venture. Neither is it a blockbuster. Yet it is of immense interest to those who eat and sleep Bollywood. It is not simply about a simple middle class man’s desperate attempt to make his bubbly wife fall in love with him. It is actually an attempt at deconstructing the image of the Bollywood romantic hero constructed through the past five decades. The super-dynamic hero such as Raj of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge or Rahul of Dil to Pagal Hai has been so far an object of desire. I consciously use the word “object”; for a human being cannot have all the qualities he possesses. Even the epics could not create such a character; so why Draupadi had to marry five men. The qualities she asked for in a husband could not possibly converge in one man. Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi is the story of a human being who endeavours to appropriate the qualities of that “object” to woo his wife who says that she would never be able to love him, and ends up proving to himself and to his wife that true love perhaps has no connection with an outwardly romantic “image”. Surinder is Raj and Raj is Surinder; both sides of the same coin, literally. The conflict between the two selves of the protagonist is actually a conflict between reality and illusion. For Tani, Surinder is a reality which she shies away from; on the other hand, Raj is an apparent reality of the image of several Bollywood heroes she has so far worshipped, and therefore highly desirable. However, it is Surinder she finally falls in love with. The film becomes her bildungsroman whereby she rediscovers her husband and falls in love with him, him who she thought she would never be able to love. Her refusal to elope with Raj underlines her maturing into a woman who learns to separate true love from the filmy paraphernalia surrounding it. Consequently, the unfashionable middle class man who used to envy the Bollywood hero and feel belittled by his unmatchable zing and irresistible sex appeal, breathes a sigh of relief. For, the SRK who had created this hero now deconstructs the same. The film demands a willing suspension of disbelief; but such suspension is worthwhile. The film would remind of the Hrishikesh Mukherjee blockbuster Golmaal; but thematically it is closer to another SRK flick Paheli. And most interestingly, the film also marks a journey of Aditya Chopra, the filmmaker: he seems to engage in dialogue with the Yash Raj films released so far, and his new hero Surinder seems disruptive in the light of the other Chopra films. This disruptive hero however would give Bollywood commercial cinema a new mileage, whereby it might abandon its self-constructed romantic realm to live closer to reality!

Why Label Terrorism?

The word “terrorist”, like the word “alien”, has come to represent a special category: and in labelling terrorists as terrorists, we tend to alienate them from the human community. They are “they” as against “us”, the “normal” human beings. This they/us binary is the sole cause behind the catastrophic terror attacks that took so many innocent lives in Mumbai. More dangerously, these terrorists again are identified as having particular religious affiliations! Incidentally, all the attackers have been found to belong to the Muslim community, a revelation that catapulted the media into labelling the attack on Mumbai as another example of Muslim terrorism, engineered by the infamous LeT. There is no harm in disclosing correct information to the public; but what is objectionable is the relentless labelling of this terror attack as Muslim. It is a current trend in the media to associate religion with violence. True, the Hindutva pogroms in Mumbai and Godhra have left deep sores in the soul of the subcontinent; but which Hindu script, which Hindu God teaches violence? The ideology of Hindutva is a new ideology which has nothing to do with traditional Hinduism, which is spectacularly tolerant. So, when the media identifies a Sadhvi Pragya as the new emerging face of Hindu militancy, it unwittingly paves path for other kinds of militancy in the name of religion. How fair is it to label a particular form of militancy as belonging to a particular religious community? If Sadhvi Pragya is the mastermind behind the Malegaon blasts in September 2008, it is not her religion which taught her to kill 31 innocent people. Similarly, if Muslim terrorists had infiltrated into the Taj Hotel and took several lives, it is not their religion which pleaded with them to do so! Therefore, what is the point in labelling a particular form of violence as Muslim, Hindu and Christian? Even if the offenders claim that they are indulging in riots, pogroms and terror attacks in the name of religion, it must be kept in mind there is no religion, neither Hindu nor Muslim, which endorses such inhuman acts. There is a particular group of people who are incidentally Hindu or incidentally Muslim who have a predilection to proclaim their supremacy in this world, at any expense whatsoever. Terror attacks or riots are nothing but power pageants in which innocent people are butchered. And since we never stop dissociating religion from these pogroms or terror attacks, all efforts to unite fall apart. If LeT incidentally belongs to Pakistan, there is no point in hating the country as a whole. If a saffron-clad group plans organized violence against people of the Muslim community, there is no point in thinking that all of India is hell-bent on wiping out the Muslims. Since the real originators of violence are never identified properly, and even if they are, their religious allegiance is so conspicuously highlighted, that anger of the common mass is directed towards a religious community as a whole or a country as a whole. This causes more alienation and fragmentation and of course, more violence. For how long would we continue to believe in divide and rule? It is not a Hindu that is a Muslim is sceptical of and vice-versa; it is a constructed image of a Hindu or a constructed image of a Muslim which is the source of fear. Let’s dissociate religion from terrorism once and forever!