“It may help get votes, although I doubt that, but demonizing the Muslim community as Kesari Veer does, won’t sell tickets. The audience is too smart for that,” says Roshan Singh, a prominent exhibitor in Bihar.
With its parade of awful special effects, uni-dimensional characters, tacky dialogues, and uniformly bad performances, Kesari Veer is a textbook on how not to make cinema.
In fact, Kesari is not cinema at all. It is hateful, toxic propaganda that the makers foolishly feel would please the powers that be. These vitiated elements forget that PM Modi’s government doesn’t propagate hatred. So, all the hate-mongers in the film industry, stop hurling hatred on the screen in the hope of pleasing the rulers. Stop making propaganda your agency of attention. It won’t work.
Hinduism isn’t about hating and targeting any community. Cinema certainly is not that.
On the other hand, the innocuous inclusive comedy Bhool Chuk Maaf is making the cash registers ring for the very reason why Kesari Veer isn’t. It touches the core of the Indian ethos, cultural inclusiveness, and religious oneness.
I spoke to Rajkummar Rao after the film’s release, and he had something very beautiful to say about the raison d’etre of cinema. “I always feel I want to do the films that bring every community into cinema. There, in the theatre, everyone becomes one. We worked very hard to make Bhool Chuk Maaf original, amusing, and crowd-pleasing.”
Coming Friday, Amran Amrohi’s sweet, tender, and, yes, original Chidiya tells us the same thing: don’t fall for the cheap ploys of the hatemongers.
