kaapimusings

Just when you felt that Bollywood was evolving and women were finally get the voice and respect they deserve, IIFA in New York saw Karan Johar, Saif Ali Khan and Varun Dhawan mock Kangana Ranaut, and rekindle the whole who’s the most nepotistic of them all controversy. In a shocking display of the chauvinism, arrogance and male privilege that continues to plague Bollywood, the three men ganged up against a successful female actor, demanding her silence and mocking her on an international platform as the world watched. Bravo!! Just when we thought we had laid the nepotism tantrum to rest, Karan Johar chose to prove the accusations against him right. What an otherwise articulate and progressive Saif Ali Khan, and barely out his Bollywood diapers Varun Dhawan were doing, is anybody’s guess. Dhawan, whose father made some of the crassest and commercially successful films in the 90’s, won an award for being in a such a film, where his abs put in a searing performance. Handing th...

Recently while flipping channels as I waited to tuck into my lunch, I had the joy of watching a few minutes of Ghulam on life OK only to hear the villain have a mental aside to the audience about how he was glad his wife was cowering in fright atop a cupboard. He hoped she would fall down and break her leg so that she would have to lie in their bed for a month atleast allowing him time to forcibly have sex with her. As I prevented myself from dropping the plate of yumminess I was holding I couldn’t help but gag a little. While the natural order of things is to progress and move forward, Indian television seems to have clearly missed that brief. There has been a lot of furor recently about the upcoming show Pehredaar piya ki and its depiction of a marriage between an older woman and a young child of 10. The promos were disturbing to say the least. Dressed suffocatingly in tradition, (and Aishwarya Rai’s dry-cleaned wardrobe from Jodha Akbar) a young woman steps out to celebr...