A Girl’s Dream; A Woman’s Nightmare

She had grown liking him. He as the chocolate boy of Bollywood was her first crush as the rosebud of her feminine self blossomed to womanish likes, dislikes and desires through her teens. Her school and later college friends teased her about this unachievable ‘boyfriend’. She herself took it to be the first love, not just a crush. In her room any other picture or wall adoring had to fight for a tiny inch square of space as Aamir’s seductive gaze peeped from different angles, in different moods and different surroundings.

As a teenager, growing up in Delhi she had all the fancy possible to a teenaged self for the good-looking Khan. Day in and day out she pined for him as the prince-charming wooed not so good-looking heroines, but luckier than her, in romantic, sashaying, melodious stories. So many times the girl in her visualised herself as the heroine dreamily courted by the charming heartthrob. The infatuation was to the extent of convincing her that it was pure love and she could not so much as fall in real love with any of the eligible guys around on the Delhi University campus.

While the innocent feminine bud was blossoming in her teenaged self, she had liked and appreciated each and every movie the actor churned out. As she lit up as a full woman she turned out to be remarkably confident. She could speak and express her opinions pretty eloquently. She was beautiful, young, outgoing, all the necessary ingredients for a student politician. As the ABVP presidential candidate in DUSU elections she created ripples and brainstormed the other opponents with her charming persona and won the election. Even the senior leadership in the BJP took notice of this next generation political crop that would carry the saffron flag ahead on the political path to make India a developed Hindu Rasthra.

Practical life is far away, beyond and beneath the innocent, selfless cooings of adolescence. The girl who loved Aamir for his any type of role in any movie was now a practical woman who praised his performance in some selected movies. She was reserved now in her praise of the actor, even in intimate conversation with former college friends. She now formally appreciated the crusading police officer in Sarfarosh, ferociously nationalistic Mangal Pandey in Mangal Pandey: The Rising, and the cricketer peasant in Lagaan who valiantly fought with rustic wooden bat to beat the Englishman blue with his Hindustani determination.

Her oratory, charm and enthusiasm were sufficient to get her a contesting ticket by the BJP in the 2015 Delhi assembly elections. As Kejriwal’s symbolic Tsunami coasted to an unprecedented political catastrophe for the ruling party at the centre, she also lost. It was a massive dent on her young political self. She knew a major chunk in her constituency comprised Muslim votes. They must have gone 100 percent against her. She was becoming more nationalistic, but she was becoming anti-Islamic in equal proportions.

As the autumn of 2015 arrived to drizzle down pale leaves off the branches, the art and literature tree of India also seemed ready to shed its extra burden. It was no spring, no fruition, but it thought of doing its duty for the safety of the nation under the BJP government. Even though there were cool, sunny days of earlier, the tree got panicked of the impending storm of ‘intolerance’. It shed many trophies hanging from its secular branches. It was doing its duty to save the nation. Writers and artists were herding to return their awards. People just looked around to find any type of damage done by the storm. But nothing had changed. It looked the same. The very same India. The writers and artists said they were protesting against the malice in ‘their’ hearts. Elsewhere the world became still unsafe and more violent as the ISIS and western powers got embroiled in a bloody game to turn common man’s life hell. At the start of the last week of November in Delhi, the winter was creeping up inevitably amidst all talks of the intellectuals and artists harking too much of ‘intolerance’ and the common man trying to peek through the smog to find out the devastation wreaked by the storm. But it was the same polluted, smoggy air in Delhi and elsewhere. India had not changed. It was the same India again. Then Aamir Khan jumped into the bandwagon. He threw a googlie. He added weight to the scared guild of writers and artists.

She was furious about the statement. As an exception as a good looking young female politician, she had hundred thousand plus followers on twitter. Aamir had turned villain overnight. And to her more so. Beyond political posturing, she was offended at the level of a common, nameless and religionless fan who had made Aamir the star that he was. She tweeted her blog link to the effect:           

When Aamir Khan says he and his wife get scared for the safety of their children, it's like somebody travelling in a cruise liner coursing through the safest waters and getting on the sun deck and instead of feeling blissful and obliged cries 'I am going to be drowned in the storm'. Meanwhile millions others are happily rocking their little boats to safety in the waters that are always risky for their little carriers because these are too mundane and small.

In a news channel in a debate among artists, and rightist, centralist and leftist politicians, she was almost shaking with anger. Her voice audible over the dissenting Congress spokesman:

So the illustrious superstar's Hindu wife is scared for her kids! We the audience, who have made her husband a superstar, deserve a chance to know exactly the reasons that scared her out of guts and run for asylum. We want to know the specifics. The star couple has to clarify:

How many threatening calls they received?

How many trishul wielding sadhus were found chasing their kids being carried in a secure SUV and having armed bodyguards?

How many naughty kids in their class jeered at them for having a Muslim father?

How many directors and producers denied Aamir a cast for being a Muslim?

How many times the Muslim superstar's wife was chased out of a mall for bringing shame to the Hindu nation?

How many times they were harassed by the 'agencies' on flimsy grounds.

Alas there is no answer to these questions. There would have been multiple answers to these questions had Aamir been in a Muslim state. This is incredible India. His poorly calculated political statement exposes him as a man who looks at society through religious glasses.

At one point, she got so hyper to shut off all dissenting voices in the studio to stare straight at the screen and ask it straight from the actor, who might be watching the prime time debate or may watch later if it got into gossips with its sledge hammering affects. With her nostrils flared up like a wounded woman whose man had been caught erring, she addressed invisible Aamir: 

Dear Aamir, we as the people who made you a star at the cost of our time and money just ask you a question. Are millions of applauds and claps and heartfelt appreciation by Indians, just as Indians and not as Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians, fall short of keeping you happy and safe in India against fake innocuous media posturing by certain individuals? Even you know what you said was anything but reality. You said it on political grounds. But do you even know what sense of insecurity it will fuel in the minority community. The minority communities are already unjustifiably on the back-foot psychologically because of genocidal fee-faw scenarios forecasted by the pseudo-secularists in the country who use this fear to catch their votes. You have been an entertainer. Why did you turn a politician suddenly and started making one section of people scared and the other section angry?

But she forgot that even the fan in her turned a politician now and was looking at the adorable star with blurred judgmental eyes. Her anti-Aamir tirade went on for a week. In an interview to a news magazine, she carried her fight against the off-hand remark by the actor:

Steeped in super-stardom, cocooned in super-luxury, safe in the safest of a palace, guarded uncommonly by law and own bodyguards, if Aamir's proxy concern through his Hindu wife for the safety of his children stands even a chit of logic, then millions of unprotected children of poor Muslim parents would have come under untold and unparalleled atrocities so far. Has something that drastic happened in India, except jingoistic posturing of pseudo-secularist people making fake noises? If that shakes the superstar's palace and convictions to the extent of him feeling like leaving the country, then shame on we the audience who made such a common persona a superstar. He should ask Tasleema Nasreen and Salman Rushdie what it means to feel threatened on religious grounds!

Her political mentor, a senior politician in the BJP at the central level was telling her. His words boosting her sagging morale. She was his fan now. He was saying:

India is tolerant as long as a billion people, brought up on pseudo-secular diet for six decades by the Congress government, stay nonchalant and ignore the birthplace of the supreme beholder of their faith. And when they clamour for a simple desire to built a monument at the most important place in their religiosity, this simple innocuous wish that gets manifested everywhere in the world in the form of altars and monuments ranging from Mecca to African jungles, comes to degrade India as an intolerant nation.

Times change, so do we with our changing tastes, likes and dislikes. We sometimes totally turn our back to the past, even when there are such little grounds to do so.