Vox tongues Shahrukh's anus

To be honest, since 2015 or 2016, I’ve struggled to make annual best movie lists because there have not been enough contenders. So unpopularity wasn’t completely unwarranted, but things got very toxic in the last few years, and Bollywood movies have been underperforming. The Marvel films that release in India and Telugu blockbusters like RRR outperform Hindi movies even in Mumbai, which is the center of the Hindi film industry.

Bollywhore's strongest defender

There has been a relationship between Bollywood and the government, but that relationship stopped at freedom of expression. Many film stars may have had their own political opinions, but that did not stop them from making movies that were expressive, and that were brave, and that were secular in many ways. Communalism and religious prejudice have always plagued this country. It’s just that this current particular establishment has weaponized that compared to the previous ones. Why? Because Bollywood has maximum influence over the masses, and they realized very quickly that this medium is how they will get their ideas across.

Because of that, the government has broken many of the powerful people in the industry into some kind of submission.

Ken ye say we bucked them laddies?

If you go to the most obscure foreign country, the one name people will know is Shah Rukh Khan. They’ll name one of his movies from the ’90s or hum one of his famous songs. He’s been an icebreaker for Indian travelers all over the world. He’s been that icon for three decades.

SRK himself is a Muslim actor, and even if he’s playing Hindu characters in these films — which was mostly the case — there’s always a sense in the back of your head that this is a superstar who’s very open about his religion, who’s not ashamed of his religion, who doesn’t hide his religion. The current government has wanted stars to cozy up to its Hindu nationalist narrative. Shah Rukh Khan, though, has resisted and kept his silence, which has become a statement. He hasn’t spoken up for the government as much as a lot of the other celebrities in this country, so you always feel like he hasn’t conformed and he is not broken.

Goodness gracious I just want to grill

And that's Khan covertly dogwhistling a desire to burn Modi on a stake more at 11

All this reached a head last year when the saga with SRK’s son unfolded. Aryan Khan [then 23] was arrested and jailed on trumped-up drug charges. As ironic as it may sound, that’s when the tides turned against the right-wing government and toward SRK. People felt the government went too far. It was too blatant. They went after a Muslim superstar and everyone’s favorite hero. That’s part of Pathaan’s success as well.

Nooo you can't arrest famous people's children you're only supposed to arrest irrelevant poors

The significance of the title is that patriotism isn’t a Hindu birthright anymore. It’s not tied to a certain kind of religion. I see a lot of people criticizing the fact that SRK’s character doesn’t say he’s an Indian Muslim. We don’t know his real name — Pathaan was given to him by a family he met in Afghanistan. But it’s not about what kind of Muslim you are or where you come from. It’s the fact that your love for your country, your love for film, your love for people, your love for art in general, should not be hijacked by one particular community.

These people are just going to pretend the first president bhajipao nominated wasn't a based patriotic muzzie lmao. Rest in peace missile man.

When I started watching the film, two scenes in the beginning scared me. The first scene shows a Pakistani general vowing to destroy India, and the second is SRK’s introduction, where he tells someone to only speak in Hindi, a metric that this current government has been really pushing down our throats in the last 10 years. I was quite wary.

But then if you read deeper into a silly film like this — and it is silly on its surface — I don’t think the vilification of Pakistan exists as people think it does. The main female actor, Deepika Padukone, plays an ISI [Pakistan’s CIA] agent who rebels against her own government, who does not agree with what the ISI is doing, and says that her people would never agree to biological warfare against India. That Pakistan is the Pakistan that we don’t see in Hindi movies enough.

As long as you're a hot Paki foid willing to betray your people you'll get a nice peepeeing instead of a bullet

Tangential Paki sneed

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/feb/03/bollywood-pakistan-muslims-narendra-modi-india

Bollywood has always reflected Indian political trends; the films of the 1950s mirrored the optimism and romance of the newly independent country, the 1970s hero was a proud but disenfranchised man fighting against the powerful and corrupt. In the 1990s, there were endless films about neo-liberal yuppies who worked in Dubai, danced in London discos and drove shiny Mercedes. Since Narendra Modi and his rightwing party, the Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP, came to power nearly nine years ago, Bollywood has readily embraced his menacing politics.

God looking back those 90s films were suicide inducing levels of cringe.

In 2018, the starlet Alia Bhatt headlined Raazi, a film about a woman who marries a Pakistani army officer in order to spy on the country during the 1971 war with India. In 2019, Bollywood released Uri, a military flick about Indian special forces launching a “surgical strike” on Pakistan after a supposed terror attack. Though Uri was based on a real incident that nearly brought two nuclear-armed states to war, it played fast and loose with the facts.

All this is especially unpleasant as Pakistanis have traditionally been enthusiastic audiences for Bollywood – the industry brought us songs and fun and the profound knowledge that our neighbours look and live just like us, demonstrating the incredible power of culture done right.

If after 60 years of being fed bollyslop they still want to kill us its obvious that isn't the case though

I interviewed Khan, or SRK, as he is known to his hundreds of million fans around the world, for a book five years ago and noticed even then that he straddles an uncomfortable role as the ever grateful Muslim who is really, really, really Indian. As India embraces the Hindu majoritarian politics of its ruling BJP party, high-profile Muslim figures like Khan are increasingly seen as fifth columnists. Trolls and angry protesters often beseech Muslim stars to “go back to Pakistan”, though they have no roots there. Today in India, anyone who questions the government or dissents from popular discourse is slandered as “anti-national” and told to go live in Pakistan.

Imagine liking the country that made you famous and rich. You should hate it and fund blasts in it that's how you can be a true Muslim.

Khan’s film Pathaan provides cover and does much needed glamour work for the Indian state and the gross abuses that the abrogation of article 370 resulted in: the longest internet shutdown to take place in a democracy, the arrest of thousands of Kashmiri protesters, the sending in of thousands of paramilitary troops and untold other human rights violations. To set up an event such as the degradation of Kashmir as a fun plot point – those who are against the revocation of article 370 are homicidal maniacs and those who defend it, such as Khan, are valiant government agents with pectoral muscles – is beyond tragic. The political project of Modi’s quasi-fascist BJP cannot be set to fun music and helicopter stunts, try as Bollywood might.

The context is what makes it even funnier though. We will flood Kashmir with Biharis and they VILL like it.

A byproduct of Modi’s visceral hatred of Muslims has been a strengthening of ties between India and Israel during his tenure. In 2017, Modi became the first Indian premier to visit Israel, where he and Benjamin Netanyahu enacted the bromance of two image-obsessed prima donnas by posing barefoot on beaches. Beyond photo ops, trade between the two countries now amounts to close to $8bn, with India now the largest buyer of Israeli military equipment in the world.

Many have argued, myself included, that Pakistan, burdened as it is by a failing economy, decades of terrorism and the humiliations of the war on terror is undergoing a cultural renaissance. Pakistani film-makers are making movies about trans love stories, female desire and the toxic societal power of patriarchal fundamentalists, and producing music that questions the divisions and partitions between us and our Indian brothers and sisters. And so it is doubly strange to watch what is happening across the border, where culture is no longer a medium used to extend conversation but rather a means to snuff it out.

So true bestie. You empower those s more we'll continue being chuds.

A lot of people say that it’s cruel to talk about box office numbers. I used to look down on these figures for the longest time, but every morning I check them. For better or worse, it’s a measuring stick for the conscience of the nation right now.

Conscience of the nation.

She had better been paid for this level of bootlicking.