What were you doing when you were 23? Sardar Udham Singh asks in the fictional recreation of his life in the Prime Video film ‘Sardar Udham’. The question is put to an Englishman who says he was the youngest detective constable in the force at that age. Udham smiles through the pain of his torture, recalling Bhagat Singh’s martyrdom. “Youth is a gift of God,” he says at another point in the film, “you want to let it wither or give it meaning”.
There have been many memes over the last three weeks about Aryan Khan and other 23-year-olds, usually Neeraj Chopra, the Olympic gold medalist in javelin, comparing their achievements. Comparing is something Indians do very well. It’s ingrained in our school system, which is based on marks; in our college admissions, which is based on marks; in our corporate promotions, which are based on ratings. Children are not merely offspring but also possessions, to be measured according to the market, their success and failure reflecting on their parents.
Nowhere perhaps are parents judged as much as in India, and nowhere do children have such extended childhoods. Whether you’re a 23-year-old son of one of India’s biggest superstars or a 55-year-old superstar son of a famous scriptwriter, in India you’re a child until your parents pass on. They’re expected to protect you, help you, love you to death. No matter what.
Aryan Khan’s arrest was not seen as his failing. It was seen as a failing on the part of his parents. The bigger the glasshouse, the bigger the stones the world throws at you. And Shah Rukh Khan’s Mannat is a rather large glasshouse, the country’s second most famous address after Rashtrapati Bhavan, according to the actor’s jokey admission.
Much of it is because of our obsession with happy families. The idea of the perfect family has been drip-fed to us in our movies. Though it has to be said that any cursory reading of our greatest literature, our epics, will tell you the family is also the site of the greatest conflicts, whether it is between fathers and sons, or cousins. Yet the ideals passed down generations involve protective fathers, loving mothers, dutiful children. How much modern families have changed, and how much parenting itself has changed, or needs to change. Couples choose not to stay in unhappy marriages; they try to find happiness again; the children in one family are no longer necessarily from the same set of parents. Blended families are in, as is conscious uncoupling, not merely in Bollywood, but also in certain sections of society.
And obsessing about other people’s problems is a way to steer clear of our own. The more we focus on others, the less we need to acknowledge our own problems. The ideal family is often the one with the most toxic secrets. One has to remember what happened in Burari in 2018, where a family of 11 committed suicide, seemingly because their dead grandfather was speaking to them through the younger son. Yet as the documentary on it, House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths, notes, the incident just fell off the map, not attracting the kind of attention the Aarushi Talwar-Hemraj murder got or the mind space that the Jessica Lal murder captured. We don’t like too much sunlight on our dark places.
The focus on other people’s problems — especially if they’re famous — is what makes Bigg Boss compulsive viewing. Every time contestants fight over food or household tasks, we can take our minds off our kitchen sinks and our dirty laundry. Watching people behaving badly is fun, especially since it is often a proxy for our true selves.
The reason why we were addicted to the Aryan Khan prison saga is also why we were preoccupied by the death of Sushant Singh Rajput during the pandemic — a famous last name (inherited in Aryan’s case), family politics, and 24×7 media coverage. In Aryan’s case, there was a sorrowful mother, not eating, only praying, having banned the cooking of anything sweet in the house; a sleepless father subsisting on coffee and working non-stop with lawyers on strategy; a meeting in jail between father and son where both said sorry to each other; long lasting friends standing up for the family, one posting surety for bail, another driving to meet him the very day it happened. We could feel the pain and understand the dilemma of parents who were abiding by the law, keeping quiet, and weathering the storm. Just as we understood the misery in Sushant’s case, a grieving father, sisters who lost a loving brother, and the unfulfilled potential of a sensitive mind and brave heart.
But both cases have served to underline the new image of Bollywood, as a den of vice and venality. As a character in the new Netflix show ‘Call My Agent: Bollywood’ says, Bollywood is a shit show, even as the ingénue agent, his unacknowledged daughter, says she’s ready to do anything to get into the movies: fetch chai, coffee or even cocaine for the actors.
The Aryan Khan saga is not over yet. Famous almost since the day he was born, much like Taimur Ali Khan today, there has always been enormous interest in his life. From where he studied, to the number of somersaults he can do, to who his friends are. His Instagram account already has 1.8 million followers, without his ever having made an effort, except to scowl at the camera from various foreign locations. The three weeks he spent in Arthur Road Jail must have left an impact on him, enabling him to see a world far beyond the purified air bubble star children breathe. How he uses this experience will make him the man he could be.
Our founding fathers did not have a very high opinion of the movies, stemming perhaps from Mahatma Gandhi’s disdain for it. Perhaps acting out your fantasies in front of the camera paled in comparison—rightly so—than fighting for the country’s freedom. Maybe these incidents serve as a way to tell us that there are worlds other than that of glamour for 23-year-olds to conquer.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not represent the stand of this publication.)
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