Open Letter to Aamir Khan on AIB Roast

“You can only be offended if you choose to take offense.”
Nikhil Vaish 

Dear Aamir,

We met one time for a business meeting almost two decades ago. I doubt you will remember, but there were a few things about our meeting and the impression you made on me that I never forgot.

The first thing that surprised me is that you asked your manager not to join our meeting. Every Bollywood star we had dealt with had insisted that we communicate with them through their managers. I guess seeing the surprise on our faces you explained that you liked to speak for yourself and manage your own affairs. You believed all your professional decisions were yours to make and added that, being the ultimate decision-maker, you would also be wasting our time by making us go through a manager. Both my creative head and I respected you for this professional courtesy.

The second thing that impressed me greatly was your no bullshit common sense and clear understanding of the fundamentals of marketing. We had come to talk to you about a big national ad campaign that we were developing for a multi-national company.  Other stars we had spoken with cared mostly about negotiating their fees and discussing travel arrangements, asking if family could accompany them at our expense. But you spent all of your time quizzing us about details of the script, insisting you would need final sign-off, and then proceeded to drill us about the media strategy. No actor had ever asked about any of this information, or even seemed to care. I know my creative director was glad he had brought this account man along!

Sufficed to say, while I will not divulge the details of our meeting, your logic was sound and demonstrated an innate understating of building and managing brands. It was also in complete contrast to the immaturity, emotional histrionics and self-absorption we were warned to expect from Bollywood. Yet, this is not what impressed me most about you. It was that everything you said, you did with a wry smile. Almost as if you only half-believed or were half-serious about the all fundas and logic you were sharing with us to weigh your decision. It left me feeling that while you took your art and the business of movies very seriously, you had not succumbed to the superficiality and transient nature of stardom and success – and did not take yourself too seriously. You had a healthy dose of reality, common sense and a clear, rational head on your shoulders. I left there with greater respect for you. You were never preachy, sanctimonious or condescending.

So naturally, I was shocked the other day to read about your comments on the AIB roast, even after you admitted that you had not seen the whole show, just a clip or two. I was not bothered by the fact that you were offended by it, or that you thought it puerile, juvenile and in poor taste. What troubled me greatly was that you equated it to violence. You said, "I felt it was a very violent event. Violence is not only physical; it can be verbal and emotional too. When you insult someone, you perpetuate violence…" (Source: “Aamir Khan, be a Responsible Celebrity”, NDTV). You did say that you were not advocating a witch hunt against those involved, but also went on to say that they should be punished if they broke any laws and you called them irresponsible; adding that celebrities need to be more responsible.

I will not get into the double standard, based on your own defence of Delhi Belly or more recently for PK, as many others have written about this. I want to re-iterate the point about your responsibility, as a celebrity. A blogger named Vidyut also made this point quite passionately. You are a super star and that means you have a super mega pulpit. Based purely on your celebrity, people listen to you with rose-tinted glasses when you speak about any issue, versus ANY other prominent public figure. And people tend to try and rationalise emotional issues in emotional and irrational ways. As Vidyut puts it: “When a large voice like yours tells people that people speaking must be careful, and people who get offended can ask them to stop, a thousand voices like mine get raw throats trying to talk sanity on the issue and explain why it is not okay to shut people up just because you don’t like what they say. “but even Aamir Khan agrees…” (Source: “Open letter to Aamir Khan” by Vidyut).

The Aamir I met might say with a wry smile, something that I know my father would have said, that “the AIB Roast is not my idea of intelligent humour and in my mind the jokes went beyond a sense of decency and decorum that I strive to uphold BUT this is a free country; and Karan, Tanmay, the AIB gang and their audience were all adults. If they can find an audience for this type of puerile and juvenile rubbish (and people are willing to throw away their hard earned money to watch it), then all the power to them; just don’t ever expect me to condone it or be part of it.” 

Now more than ever, India needs the Aamir I met all those years ago. We need him to come down from his perch and talk sense, so that cooler heads can once again prevail in this important and necessary debate.

Sincerely,
Nikhil

Also read: "In Defense of Being Offensive and the AIB Roast"

 

The New Social Revolution

"I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”

Howard Beale (in Network)

The world did not end on 21^st December 2012, but something amazing has started to happen this past year, and it is happening all over the world. It is not something I have witnessed in my lifetime or, I suspect, my parents in theirs. The youth all over the developing world have found their collective voice and are starting to use it to fight social injustice. They are even willing to take to the streets and stay until things really change. One could argue that perhaps the greatest generation was like that too, but they faced much greater adversity with two world wars. However, there is still one other fundamental difference from any other time in history. Every other great movement of the people has been led by a single charismatic leader or been galvanized by some government. The youth today are nameless and faceless, but rally around a cause that they believe in, not behind a personality or party. There is something rawer, authentic, grassroots and democratic about the way these spontaneous protest movements are erupting all over the world from America to Egypt to India and even Russia. Governments have never faced this type of opposition and most of them have no idea how to engage with it, choosing instead to deal with it through police and riot gear. This is the ultimate vox pop and all of the governments are missing the writing on the wall.

Technology may have enabled and does help facilitate the rapidity of these movements, but they are fueled by something much more powerful than a Twitter or Facebook account. For our leaders to discount them as such would be foolhardy and perilous to their existence. These movements are fueled by a feeling of gross social injustice, and government’s failure to be for the people; not by words but by their actions. It is for this reason that they are not like the seventies age anti-war demonstrations. They are much bigger because they are about society and their rights, as a whole. And they are directly related to issues that a government is meant to deliver and solve for its people from public safety to every citizen’s right to free speech. Simply ignoring them will not make them go away or lose steam. Making speeches filled with platitudes and promises might placate them for a few minutes but they will still not go away until there is follow-through. Politicians the world over have not yet understood this. Passing a few new laws will also not extinguish these fires; it will only fan the flames. Only real and meaningful change that the average person on the street feels the impact of will make a difference.

Mohammed Morsi, the Egyptian president, learned this the hard way and had to annul a constitutional decree that would have given him wide-ranging powers and made him accountable to no other government authority, including the judiciary. Even the new Egyptian constitution that was hurriedly passed only garnered votes from one third of the population, making it unacceptable to the majority of the country. You need to look no further than Tahrir Square tonight to see if the youth and people of Egypt are satisfied.

In India, our politicians are used to never being questioned or required to deliver on their promises. Scam after scam has been uncovered this past year, and yet not one single politician or bureaucrat has been prosecuted. In fact, the ruling party seems to believe that silence is the best weapon against protests from the people. However, the number of instances and the sheer egregiousness of government excess, corruption and apathy have slowly been reaching a boiling point with the youth of India. From the Bombay police acting like moral guardians of society; arresting teenagers for holding hands in public parks after dark, or a girl for opposing a Bombay bandh to the nation witnessing the horror of human bite marks on baby Falak. The final straw has been the barbaric rape (even wild animals are better than these men) of a twenty-three year old girl, nicknamed Brave Heart, in the middle of South Delhi at nine-thirty in the evening. The Indian youth are saying that they too are mad as hell and that they are not willing to take the same old same old anymore. The reaction from our politicians has been laughably predictable. First there was complete silence, then riot police were called in, and then an effort was made to discredit the protestors as nothing more than a bunch of miscreants. But this time the people did not disperse or quietly fade away with the last flicker of the candles. This time the people have called our out of touch political elite's bluff. This time they have not been placated by words or more empty promises. This time they are demanding action and will not leave the streets until they believe there will be some real and meaningful change, and they start to see it implemented.

The thing our politicians need to realise is that while it may be the youth in these countries that are starting and leading these movements and protests, they are managing to achieve something that no generation has before them. They are starting to wake up the rest of us. This is a global revolution underway, and every country will be in the cross hairs, mark my words. China, USA, Russia and UK beware. Our youth are stirring the same passion and patriotic fervour across generations, from senior citizens to parents to teens; from the middle class to farmers and to the poorest segments of society. From big cities to tiny villages, the lights are starting to come on and people are starting to come out. Until now my generation has always complained about the problems we face. We bitch and moan about all the issues, but then we quietly sink back into our comfortable armchairs and sip on our aged scotch. But this time I feel like something is different. Our youth are waking us up from our accepting and lethargic slumber because now…

…I AM MAD AS HELL AND I AM NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!