Keep the bombs out of this, please

I think the FBI was behind the Sunday theatre bombings. After all, they have at least as much reason to be upset as the Sikhs, right? All th...

I think the FBI was behind the Sunday theatre bombings. After all, they have at least as much reason to be upset as the Sikhs, right? All the ‘Thank you New York, Thank You Palm Beach, Thank You Miami’ credits don’t really set the tone for what follows in Sunny Deol-starrer Jo Bole So Nihaal.

In the film, members of the US organisation are portrayed as Fully Bewakoof Insaans who are plotting to assassinate the US president on July 4. They are lectured repeatedly on their incompetency including on how their lax security systems resulted in 9/11. Office wear for the desi female FBI agent is a yellow, ‘Perfect Police Officer’ cropped T-shirt. Her most lethal weapons are her belly button and her airlifted breasts. And director Rahul Rawail’s police officer from Punjab may be honest, but he’s also a racist who keeps up a tedious chant of white people jokes.

As two crude bombs went off in Delhi on Sunday night, a tightly-packed multiplex in the heart of Mumbai’s business district was oblivious to the scary news. Yet there were enough angry people there who were not Sikhs.

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In fact, there were more Bohras than Sikhs in the audience. Perhaps they had come to watch the appalling caricature of Tyeb, the veterinarian relative with soda bottle glasses who’s every ‘F’ sounded like an ‘S’? There were lots of women too who, like me, might have gotten irritated when clean cop Deol calls the FBI agent “a whore”. In fact, Muslims and women top list of groups that Bollywood loves bashing. Sikhs can wait their turn please.

And what about the Catholics? The main villain of the film was Romeo, who felt the need to download after each crime. Every Sunday, off he went to confession, and promptly snapped the neck of the hapless priest who happened to hear him out. Then, a satisfied sign of the cross later, a quick exit.

So where does that leave Sunday evening movie viewing? If everybody planted a bomb every time a Bollywood movie outraged them, all the six art deco cinemas in my Mumbai neigbourhood would have been destroyed long before the multiplexes started gobbling them up.

I still cringe when I think of the prolonged rape sequences in Insaaf Ka Tarazu, or the way women were portrayed in that ’80s family blockbuster Hum Aapke Hain Koun? Yet I’ve always been proud of the fact that I’ve never walked out of a Hindi movie (not even one starring Mithun) at the interval. The only exception was the time I dragged a friend to see a Govinda movie on the condition that if she didn’t fall in love with him by the interval, I would leave. She didn’t.

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So is this the way people are going to get angry now? Does that mean, that in addition to yelling at the man who’s on his cellphone loudly discussing how much money he made in the stockmarket last week, I will now have to worry about whether a bomb will terminate my movie-watching experience before the slow tortuous climax of a Bollywood B-grader? Will the movie end before the headache, from the boisterous soundtrack, sets in?

The Indian movie experience is stressful enough. Snaking lines for stale, overpriced popcorn, wailing infants who should have been left at home with the babysitter, sudden encounters with relatives you haven’t seen in ages, loud mobile rings, paan stains, an audience that will never learn to clean up its own trash.

Can we please keep bombs out of the equation?