Bollywood hypocrisy

The reportedly rising number of readers of this page are surely well aware that your editor is no Bollywood buff, and certainly not a fan of its over-hyped ham actors, whose movies are an assault on the senses and an insult to people with even minimal intelligence and logic. However a surprise endorsement of my sustained constructive criticism of the braindead badshahs of Bollywood and their overpaid and over-the-top actors, came from an unexpected quarter as a new year gift. Writing in the mainstream Sunday Times of India (December 30) about rising crimes against women in the context of the brutal rape and murder of the 23-year-old physiotherapy intern in Delhi, egg-head economist Swaminathan Aiyar indicted Bollywood cinema and its matinee idols for popularising sexual harassment of women. “What’s truly terrible is the manner in which film heroes have for decades pestered, stalked and forced their unwanted attentions on heroines in a thousand films, yet ended up getting the girl,” writes Aiyar, accusing matinee idols Dev Anand, Raj Kapoor, Dharmendra and even the mighty Amitabh Bachchan and contemporary Bollywood superstar Ranbir Kapoor of being sexual harassment experts. In November writing on this page, your editor expressed depressing lack of enthusiasm for the 70th birthday celebrations of Bollywood icon Amitabh Bachchan, a nationwide event choreographed by fawning television anchors. A contributory cause was the airing of a song-n-dance number from his mega-hit film Hum (1991) in which  several dozen leering men led by the superstar, surround the heroine and douse her with water while demanding a kiss. My interpretation of the message in the song was that if she didn’t choose AB as her mate, the whole lot would pile on to her. And Bachchan read a televised elegy to the paramedic who was violently gangraped to death in Delhi. The deadly sin of hypocrisy is not the monopoly of the country’s sleazy politicians.  Hyde side The relinquishing of office as chairman of Tata Sons Ltd, India’s largest private sector business conglomerate (annual sales revenue: Rs.475,721 crore) by Ratan Tata on December 28, marked the end of a golden era in Indian industry and prompted much lamentation in the boardrooms of India Inc and the media. By any yardstick, RT had an astonishingly successful 21-year run after being anointed his successor by the legendary JRD Tata in 1991. As the first editor of the country’s pioneer business magazines (Business India and Businessworld) which stridently advocated the end of the licence-permit-quota raj, your editor had a good rapport with Bombay House, and particularly with the late JRD Tata (1904-1993).In the 1980s when BI and BW were both well established, Ratan Tata was dismissed by the media and captains of India Inc as a rank outsider in the race to succeed JRD in Bombay House. At the time, Ratan was chairman of the limping National Electronics Co which had unsuccessfully ventured into manufacturing colour television sets. However, simultaneously he had authored a plan for the consolidation of the Tata Group into a handful of core businesses and…