You may say I am a dreamer, but I am not the only one...

People don’t want hunger, indignity, injustice. People don’t want to commit mass suicide. People want to enter the mainstream, enjoy the fruits of democracy

Amit Sengupta Delhi

Okay, Kajrare was fabulous, and for once, even an eternally clinical, antiseptic, refrigerated Aishwarya Rai actually titillated with salty sensuality -- but what was the Samajwadi Party’s B family doing with Ash at Varanasi’s Sankat Mochan Mandir? Were they appeasing the pre-wedding Madhushala gods? Or were they sending the message that all Manglik women are pre and post-condemned, that only multiple rituals performed by an army of Brahmin priests can save them? At least the media gave this message: since the rituals were documented in great detail by the genius reporters of our English dailies with photo-ops of a demure Bharatiya nari, that is, Ash the antiseptic, dutifully following her in-laws etc through the maze of Manglik cleansing ceremonies.

Indeed, if there was one classic case of a best-selling brand, and a best-selling brand family, selling the most mindless, anti-woman, anti-scientific, anti-rationality, anti-modernity message, it was this incredible Sankat Mochan exercise. If the ‘Indian of the year’ (how, why, on what ground, if not only pure commerce?) is a role model, like his son, and Ash, then what is the message to the nation? That all Manglik women are pre-ordained in their immaculate misconception to be condemned?

In any case, Amitabh Bachchan, who started of as a thin and lean anti-establishment icon with that hungry look in the angry 1970s of the failed idealism of a failed democracy, ended up as a failed tycoon who genuinely missed the abc of authentic greatness, until Amar Singh fixed his debt-ridden resurrection with KBC. So what is the Big B doing these days? Selling, selling, selling – perhaps except for sanitary napkins this man is selling every product on earth. Last reported, he had donated a few crores worth for a crown for a cash-rich south Indian temple, that’s great philanthropy no doubt. But how is he a role model for the nation if he is only making hordes of money for himself and his family and for obscenely prosperous gods?

Bachchan would have been a role model if he had the courage to break conformist thresholds, if he had made meaningful cinema, like actors Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, George Clooney, Jodie Foster, and Shashi Kapoor as producer; if he had been moved by farmer suicides and hungry children; if he had financed great cinema; and if he had, at least, built a hospital cum research centre on that rare disease which almost killed him after Coolie and when the entire nation prayed for him.

Mass adulation can make you a money-making brand, but it means nothing for the soul, for society or for history. Because true greatness can’t be bought or sold, like the memory of Che Guevara or the writings of Munshi Premchand or the films of Guru Dutt, Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak.