PK, the film and the controversy

Centuries ago, a Hindu named Vatsyayana wrote a treatise that, if filmed, would never clear the Censor Board today. The erotic imagination of another Hindu named Jayadeva, whose Gita Govinda depicts an intensely physical aspect of Lord Krishna, is something you want to introduce to Alok Sanjar, the BJP MP from Bhopal who recently remarked that frequent sex can drastically reduce a person’s lifespan. And yet, here we are again, having to defend Hinduism from those who seem to think that the slightest hint of humour or heresy can bring crashing down a religion that has stood strong for millennia. I refer, of course, to the controversy around the Hindu director Rajkumar Hirani’s pk. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad wants it banned, and its members, along with those charming chaps from the Bajrang Dal, have taken to tearing up the film’s posters and halting screenings. The reason? According to VHP spokesman Vinod Bansal, pk “keeps making fun of Hinduism.”

 Really?

I saw PK not because I wanted to see it for its narrative content but because it was being abused by these holier than thou outfits self appointed guardians of your ethics nay the determinates of our ‘correct’ cultural locations!! What’s the hullabaloo about? The theme and content are neither new nor particularly radical. Belief in the supernatural Godhead endorsed, the ‘managers’ mocked for inequity, greed, avarice, lust, corrupt practices, and playing upon fear and insecurity. we've seen it all before, umpteen number of times, from Hirani  himself in Three Idiots, in the Akshay Kumar starrer, Oh My God…no institutionalized religion is spared, indeed none deserves to be spared.

I have mourned all the  ‘abhishekams’ I have witnessed, those of the Shiva lingas as well as the huge ones at the humongous  idol at Sravenbalagola. Colossal waste all. ‘Godmen’ abound in this land and all, barring the exceptions I know not of, play upon the credulity of the average Indian in order to swindle, rob dupe and cheat. Nothing edifying or holy there!

What then is the hullabaloo about?

Is the political atmosphere in the country so charged and biased in favour of a particular ideology that we've lost all sense of right and wrong and take umbrage at the slightest provocation, indeed abandon rational logic in favour of communal hectoring?

This particular controversy, around a film that at best is average, when judged as a film alone, has saddened me…I worry about the direction this nation is walking toward…

The film …

smacks of formula, the script, neither brilliant nor intellectually absorbing, the heart does not melt.

It is the story of the outsider to beat all outsiders, an alien from another planet, who robbed of the devise that will bring his spaceship back to collect him, observes the enormously idiosyncratic rituals of earthlings and in the process points out the irrationality inherent in it all. He falls in love and experiences heartbreak, discovers his moral radar and the fact that us humans are confusing creatures, light and dark, good, bad and ugly. That’s Hrishikesk Mukharee’s formula, someone Hirani has always admired!

The treatment is not particularly outstanding, nor the situations brilliant, that the film is making so much money, tells me that the lay public approve, they approve of the mocking of ‘Godmen’ and their ilk, out there to dupe and cheat the public

The other charge against pk is that it promotes “Love Jihad,” with a romantic track that revolves around a Pakistani man named Sarfaraz and a Hindu woman with the goddess-like name of Jagat Janani, the “creator of the world”. But the romance plays out neither in India nor Pakistan, but in the relatively neutral Belgium, just like My Name is Khan set the romance between a Muslim man and a Hindu woman in the US. The women in both these films are educated, liberal – there’s no evidence that they will convert to Islam after marriage, and neither did the strong-willed Hindu heroine of Jodha Akbar renounce her religion. Even in earlier decades, you can find films like Muqaddar ka Sikandar, where the hero is raised by a Muslim woman and is in love with a Hindu. And if you consider interreligious love stories with the gender polarities reversed, you have Gadar(Muslim woman-Sikh man), Veer-Zaara (Muslim woman-Hindu man), Raanjhanaa(Muslim woman-Hindu man), Ek Tha Tiger (Muslim woman-Hindu man). Did you hear many protests against these films?

Once a film has come through the Censor Board, no one has the right to demand that it be pulled from theaters because it has offended them. Everyone is sensitive to something, and if you begin to factor it all in, you’ll never make a movie. You know this, I know this, and the outfits doing the protesting know this. Why, then, do they continue to get all hot and bothered? Is it because of the increasing “saffronization” of India, as some claim? Because the cultural climate is certainly different.

In the quirkily named pk, the narrator (Jaggu, played by Anushka Sharma) writes a book on the titular character – and that’s what the Amitabh Bachchan character did in Anand. (His book was named Anand; Jaggu’s book is named pk.) But consider the title itself. It goes back to the joke in Chupke Chupke that transformed the initials of a character (P.K.) into the Hindi word for “intoxicated”. The outsider in pk is played by Aamir Khan, and he’s named pk because people hear him speak and think he is intoxicated. But the truth is that he hails from another galaxy (he’s an alien, the outsider to beat all outsiders), and as the Dharmendra character in Chupke Chupke expressed befuddlement about the intricacies of English, pk is puzzled by the workings of Hindi. (In a hilarious scene, he ponders over the various meanings of “achcha”.) pk is more puzzled by the workings of religion. Like many earthlings, he wants to find God, but his is a more immediate purpose – he thinks God can help him return to his planet. (He’s stranded on earth, like the alien in E.T.; Jaggu is his Elliot.) He prints “Missing” posters with the images of various gods on them, and he wants them found – for only they can help him. And how does he know this? Because he’s been told repeatedly: “Only God can help you.” This bit is pure genius, and it is revealed in a flashback, the film’s best stretch. It’s truly joyous, and a textbook example of combining a message (how mystifying our religious practices are) with entertainment. The magic touch that Hirani displayed in the Munnabhai movies (and which deserted him in 3 Idiots) is back. The laughs are plenty (“dancing car”, “rotation” of chappals in temples), and Aamir plays the character beautifully. I wasn't too taken by the controversial nude poster for the film – he came off too muscled, too chiseled. But this look suits the character, making him look a little otherworldly in the midst of the portly men in Rajasthan, which is where pk lands. His wide-open green eyes and raised eyebrows (he looks perpetually astonished) and even those protruding ears look just right, and he’s amazing in a song sequence (Tharki chokro) where he robotically replicates the dance steps of a new found friend (Sanjay Dutt, as a bandmaster named Bhairon Singh). This song sequence is itself quite amazing, filled with the whimsy that is such a part of Hirani’s cinema. pk’s means of communicating with earthlings is by holding their hands, and when Bhairon Singh refuses (he’s a guy, and guys don’t hold other guys’ hands), pk looks around for women, whose hands he thinks he’s allowed to hold. Of course, this causes all kinds of mayhem, and hence the lyric –Tharki chokro. They think he’s a horny bastard, and this time, they’re the ones unable to understand him. But gradually, as pk realises the futility of searching for God, the laughs subside and we get the song Bhagwan hai kahan re tu – his plight in the face of God’s silence is truly moving. After a bomb blast perpetrated by religious extremists, we hear the Phir Subah Hogi number Aasman pe hai khuda aur zameen pe hum / aaj kal woh is taraf dekhta hai kum. No further commentary, no more dialogue is necessary. But apart from the flashback, there aren’t many scenes that stand out. (And some scenes look downright forced, like the one where pk teaches Jaggu to shrug off sadness by launching into a “cute” dance.) There’s the moment where Jaggu is stranded without cab fare, and pk offers her money – he knows what it’s like to not be able to go home. It isn’t a big scene, and the emotions aren’t exaggerated – the offhand quality of the staging is enough to make us empathise with pk. A latter sequence with Sarfaraz (Sushant Singh Rajput) is also very nicely pulled off. His early scenes with Jaggu are alarmingly bland and I wondered why they even needed to be there, but this arc is resolved most satisfyingly. The biggest relief is that the heavy-handed lecturing from 3 Idiots has been replaced by a gentler form of hectoring – we’re still staring at a wagging finger, but at least, for the most part, we aren’t being beaten over the head with a bludgeon. I don’t love it, but I certainly don’t hate it and I certainly will stand up and be counted when a count is taken for those who think it has every right to play in the theaters…