ravishingravi Posted April 10, 2011 Posted April 10, 2011 By uncle greatbong again. From couple of years back. Loved it. Sixty Published on January 26, 2010 in Politics. 125 Comments When I heard Shahrukh Moon Crater Khan tell us how humiliated he felt as the owner of the KKR at the treatment meted out to Pakistani players and more tellingly how Pakistan was a great neighbor to have, I could not resist doing my version of the dimple-cheeked, smile-to-the-side thing that turns women into moonshine and admire this man’s supreme business sense and his indefatigable desire to make money, if more proof was needed for that given his propensity for dancing at weddings. SRK may be God and even bigger than him. But that still does not change that he is at a crossroad in his career, given the less than sterling box office of Billu and the failure of his TV avatar and of course the joke that his cricket franchise has become. To make matters worse, Padma Bhushan Aamir Khan has just delivered one of Indian film history’s biggest hits, (the equivalent of scoring 550 in 50 overs in the first innings of an ODI) and SRK, given his fiercely competitive streak, must be feeling the pressure even more. If there is any time when he has needed the support of every fan, and that includes a sizable number of Pakistanis in Pakistan and abroad, it is now just before ‘My Name is Khan’ hits the screen. Of course dhanda hai yeh uska purana. Shahrukh Khan has always aggressively pursued the Pakistani and Bangladeshi audience by consistently filling his team with Pakistani stars and even with a supreme Bangladeshi dud, brought for an amount that makes even less sense than ‘Ramjaane’. The approach of cultivating foreign audiences has worked with less success in sports because unlike movies, where people enjoy all kinds of garbage as long as SRK shows his six-packs and monkeys around, in cricket you actually need to win some games so as to get ‘support’ and not be the butt end of jokes. Some of you may ask—but does not pandering to Pakistan by calling them a “good neighborâ€, an adjective as over-the-top as Shahrukh Khan’s performance in Chahat, risk alienating his fan-base in India, given Pakistan’s consistent acts of enmity that include letting the perpetrators of 26/11 walk free as heroes? Not quite. Most of the man’s fans in India could not care two hoots about his public pronouncements, just as they care two hoots for story and originality, as long as he does his SRK-ianisms. Secondly 26/11 is old news and even though people may have joined Major Unnikrishnan–the True Patriot Orkut group a year ago, they never really visited it being too busy with the interesting discussions under ‘Kajol SRK Cute jodieeeee’, too wrapped up in the intellectual cut thrust of Aamir vs SRK to be even mildly offended at SRK’s certificate of “goodness†for the kind neighbour whose consistent efforts have laid to rest many such true patriots. Given everything— past history, the nature of the Pakistani and the Indian audience, his strategy of cultivating a South-Asian fan-base all driven by his own single-minded pursuit of money , what SRK said makes perfect sense. Which is why all it gets from me is the SRK-ian chuckle. However what makes me Madann Choppraa mad is when I find, in some bulletin boards, SRK’s religion being dragged into this, not only a simplistic and totally wrong explanation for his pronouncements but one that (and this is what makes me mad) mirrors exactly the kind of hateful rhetoric that our delightful neighbors delight in. When wrong-footed Sohail Tanvir says “Hinduo ki zehniyat hi aisi hai†(Watch video from 4:21 to 4:23) I understand. Coming from Pakistan, where the education system packs them with lies about winning wars with India and equates Hindus with India and Muslims with Pakistan, I did not expect the man to say anything better. He sees the world through the exclusive prism of religion and that is understandable since it forms the very basis on which Pakistan was founded. Not India. Exactly sixty years ago, our politicians created, through an amazing process of deliberation the details of which you must read in Ramachandra Guha’s “India After Gandhiâ€, the Indian constitution which among other things defined India not in terms of religion but in terms of nationality. It is this foundation on which our history of the last sixty years has been built, a history that has seen us, despite several missteps and catastrophes, arrive at a place noone expected us to be on January 26, 1950, when we were prophecied by one and all to collapse as a country, to become an eternal hell-hole plagued by internecine religious and caste-based feuds. There are many reasons why we have stayed together (and it would take a much longer article to even begin enumerating them) but one of the main contributory factors has been our constitution and the principles of secularism, much abused as it has been by each and every political party in India, that are enshrined in it. We in India understand August 15th and its significance. It is the day we won independence from the British. It’s 26th January whose importance many of us have difficulty in wrapping our minds around. Not to take away anything from the day or the efforts of our freedom fighters, but independence in a way, given the extant political climate at that time, was inevitable. If it was not in 1947 it would have been a few years later. As it was for many Asian and African countries. However what was not inevitable was the continual perpetuation of the Indian democratic system, a system forged formally sixty years ago. Since most countries who became independent around the same time have not been able to sustain it in the same way as we have. One only needs to look at our bestest neighbor and its inevitable collapse into warring provinces to see first-hand what would have happened if we had had no Republic Day. Because Pakistan, in the strict sense, does not. Well it did once upon a time on March 23rd which was a day chosen to co-incide with the date of the Lahore Resolution (1940) when the formal demand for Pakistan was articulated. When General Ayub Khan abrogated the constitution, March 23rd lost its “republic day†significance and has since been celebrated as the birth of the idea of Pakistan (Pakistan Day). Not that Pakistan does not have a constitution, but it is one that like the scripts of Shahrukh Khan movies are always re-written according to the whims of the reigning superstar with the express intent of giving him the most screen-time, story be damned.(As an aside, one of the public holidays in Pakistan is Defense Day, which is celebrated on the day Pakistan attacked India in 1965, encapsulating, as if it needs any more encapsulation, the way our good neighbors define themselves) And as you lay back on the couch on January 26th, enjoying a public holiday and watching re-runs of “Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani†and “Oh Darling Yeh Hai Indiaâ€, it might be worth the time between advertisements to salute those remarkable men who drafted that marvelous achievement of our greatest generation—our constitution—the BR Ambedkars, the Nehrus, the Patels, the Prasads, the B.N. Raus, the Hansa Mehtas and the S.N. Mukherjees. By salute I dont mean “raise your diet coke in their honor†but endeavor to intellectually assimilate the principles on which the country was founded. If that sounds very vague, just try not to think and sound like Sohail Tanvir. You owe it to these great men. And this great day http://greatbong.net/2010/01/26/sixty/
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