Is it possible to boycott Bollywood fully in real? I don’t think so. These days boycott Bollywood hashtag is trending almost every day on Twitter. If you look at that trend closely you will see many Twitter users are favoring that Bollywood should close down forever. Reason? Well, the reasons can be many but today I am going to talk about a few of them.
Just a few months back Boycott Lal Singh Chaddha was trending on Twitter and ultimately the call not to watch Lal Singh Chaddha met success and the movie was a big flop at the box office. In my blog also supported why the call for boycotting Lal Singh Chaddha is correct. Despite supporting that I still don’t think that boycotting Bollywood is good and that the call will not be successful.
There are many reasons to support my argument. Just two days back actor Sunil Shetty (Suneil Shetty) while meeting the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Yogi Adityanath appealed to him to come out in public and ask people to stop trending boycott Bollywood hashtag. In response, Yogi Adityanath didn’t commit anything but said that if you guys do good work nothing unwanted will happen to you.
I watched that video in which Sunil Shetty was sounding very emotional. He made some excellent points and I am very much in agreement with those points. One of those points was that not everyone in Bollywood is bad or not everyone in the industry is a drug addict, yet they are being portrayed like that on social media. I think Sunil Shetty has hit the nail by saying that because I have seen there are a few handles on Twitter that are busy throwing black ink on Bollywood almost every day.
If I recall well, after the tragic death of the actor Sushant Singh Rajput two years back, kind of anti-Bollywood sentiments started to rise. Slowly with some drug connections within the film industry unearthed by various government agencies made those sentiments go strong. At that time only Bollywood and various OTP platforms were already facing the heat for insulting Hindu sentiments in their various products, continuously.
So that emotional anger for Bollywood was further fueled by the revelation of unearthed Bollywood actors’ connections with drug paddlers and slowly it turned into a solid platform to oppose Bollywood in almost everything it does. If this wasn’t enough, from South India, movies started to flow that showed plenty of respect for the Hindu religion and suddenly people of the north belt started to like South Indian movies, whether they were having cultural backgrounds or not.
Bollywood which was already facing the heat from OTT entertainment was now started to get more and more thrashing by the call of boycotts along with new releases of dubbed South Indian movies. To be honest, after the COVID period got ended, many of the Hindi movies that got released were poorly made so that also became the reason for Bollywood not making profits from the box office.
So, boycott Bollywood may have been one of the reasons why the Hindi film industry is not doing well for the last two years. At the same time, we must admit that not all the calls for the boycott have met the desired success. Despite being a staunch supporter of the cause that the Bollywood and the OTT platforms must stop insulting Hinduism or stop showing my religion in poor light, I strongly believe that not all boycott Bollywood calls are genuine.
I have observed that there are few handles or profiles on social media that I don’t know why want to dismantle Bollywood completely. They want to see and confirm that one Friday morning no new Hindi movie gets released in theatres and all the producers, directors, actors, and crew members sit in their homes as they become unemployed. To try and to get their job done, these people many times have twisted the facts and words told by any of the members of the Hindi film industry.
Even that video of an emotional plea from Sunil Shetty to Yogi Adityanath was edited by these people in such a way that looked as if Shetty is agreeing that most of the members of Bollywood are druggists. The same people will cut, copy, and paste scenes of old Hindi movies where Hinduism or Hindu bhagwans are insulted and try to prove that Bollywood always does this and that is too for ages.
I am not in disagreement that in past or since the very beginning Hinduism or Hindu sentiments were not given enough importance in Hindi movies, but at the same time I also believe that such menace started to increase only after the start of this century. Yes, in the movies made in the last century many of them the Hindu culture was ashamed or made fun of, but it wasn’t an agenda at that time like it has become after the year 2000. In the last two decades, we have seen how movie makers are busy insulting Hinduism in their movies and now in various web series despite people opposing it on social media.
For me, Bollywood is my only source of entertainment and for those thousands who work in this industry is my only source of income. I am not talking about stars, producers, or directors; I am talking about crew members and employees of thousands of cinema halls who run their home affairs with the income coming directly or indirectly via Bollywood. The call to Boycott Bollywood, if gets its success someday, I can assure you no one who wants to demolish Bollywood today will come forward to help these poor chaps.
Does that mean that we should allow Bollywood to insult Hinduism and Hindu values and culture as it is today? Absolutely not, but we can at least make Bollywood look and work differently where it starts respecting all religions including Hinduism, and not singling it out to please the followers of other religions because of the grand fear that insulting their religion may prove fatal for them. Thus, my wish is that Bollywood should come out of this agenda culture that has been spread by the people of a left-liberal mindset for years and concentrate on either full entertainment or full socio-economic messaging in their movies.
By trying to make the boycott Bollywood trend successful, those who are running that trend today will only feel the pleasure of the pain of thousands of people working for the industry. Millions like me who love Bollywood for its entertainment value only will have nothing remaining to get entertained. So the best solution is to clean up Bollywood and not clean it out.
Those who are opposing Bollywood today forget the fact that there are people like Vivek Agnihotri, Akshay Kumar, Jackie Shroff, Ajay Devgn, and Sunil Shetty himself who love our country and also respect and practice Hinduism to the core. These people are also part of the same Bollywood that those boycott-trending people want to get finished forever.
Boycott Bollywood will in any case not get success for sure but only the continuation of making bad movies can demolish Bollywood completely. So the Hindi film industry must now pull up its shocks and start making movies out of fresh and genuine stories. Stories that touch normal people’s lives and make them feel that they got their money’s worth.
Remakes will not help Hindi movies get more and more successful because the soul of that movie will always remain foreign whether the adoption is from Hollywood or from the South Indian industry. So make Hindi movies from those regions where people know how to speak, listen, live and understand the Hindi language. Once this aspect has been taken care of, I am sure most of the released Hindi movies will taste success.
Before leaving I just want to remind you one thing about those ‘boycott people’ which made me smile two days back. Those who are calling for a boycott of Bollywood are the same people who love the working style of Yogi Adityanath whom Sunil Shetty and his friends met the other day. The same people want to see no more of Bollywood but at the same time, they want Uttar Pradesh’s Film City in NOIDA gets flourish and taste bumper success, and that can only be possible if more and more Hindi movies or Bollywood movies are made there. So, if Bollywood is finished then how this dream of the ‘boycott people’ will come true?
Till then we meet next time its Aavjo from me.
7th January 2023, Saturday
Ahmedabad
SiddTalks
