FAR FROM FICTION

My grudging appreciation of Chetan Bhagat is much like my grudging appreciation for Shah Rukh Khan. Both unwittingly stumbled into stardom, and without much talent or backing, created empires that shifted the meanings of superlatives in our vocabulary. Both, in a sense, are a celebration of middle-class India’s love for mediocrity. Both are heroes of an average kind.

What they portray is a dream without the cruelty of irony or parody. Khan can still earnestly morph into a make-believe, computer generated action hero and fight the fight, talk the talk and charm the pants of his heroine. Bhagat can still write books, despite his clear paucity of expression, and postulate on what the youth of India want.  Both are marketing phenomena par excellence. Both pander to an audience only too willing to indulge their exploitation of the middle class bucket-list.

Those of us who look down on Bhagat’s style of writing often forget the kind of intuitive appeal his books have had on a generation bred solely on post-liberalisation TV programming and very little library time. The creation of his stories, it seems, is based on this very insight—it’s a seamless extension of the programmes they watch on TV, the news they consume, the women they wish they had and as always, the aspirations they need to mirror to be part of this seemingly buoyant economy.  (It has, however, been four years since he penned The Three Mistakes of My Life and India’s fortunes have dithered since.)

In the early 90s, when Switzerland was being re-imagined by Yash Chopra through his epic romances, it was Khan who shouldered the weight of middle-class aspiration. He was a one-way ticket to the Alps.  However Khan himself was beyond the aspiration and the struggle. As the poor little rich Raj, he was charmingly off limits. We revelled in the gaps he created, happy in our half-baked hopes of flying abroad one day and tasting real Swiss cheese.

Bhagat is a harbinger of a completely different generation. His heroes are call centre executives and MBA grads. It’s not so much about inherited wealth and privilege as it is about enterprise and self-worth (For the sake of this argument, let’s assume that all Bhagat’s books are potential scripts, which seems to be increasingly the case). His heroes are optimistic to a fault and smack of familiar stereotypes of the Indian middle-class. They would pick a business plan over a trip to the Alps.

What changed? Did we forget our fascination for the West? Or did we imbibe it so seamlessly that we’re happy with our mashed-up version of consumerism? Maybe a bit of both.  In Kai Po Che, Bhagat’s latest offering in Bollywood format, a familiar underdog story is played out between three men driven by different motivations. This, Three Idiots and more urbane fares like Rock On and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara are markers of another classic shift—from largely portraying the inner realms of family life to the very public nuances of friendship and camaraderie.  Friends, in a sense, become moral guidelines for right and wrong, often leading to the creation of a different set of standards to live up to. For instance, filial loyalties in Kai Po Che are trumped by what was promised to friends. There is rebellion against the idea of duty and support for breaking away from the fold. Associations with the family, like in the case of the right-wing Omi character only end in complete destruction and friendship is sacrificed for a pithy game of communal politics. The re-emergence of the multi-hero format is reminiscent of the late 80s/early 90s when it was unsuccessfully tried with films like Tridev. While Dil Chahta Hai marked a watershed moment for Hindi cinema in the new millennium, no one could quite replicate its success through the decade. Till of course it became apparent that that no new talent could singularily carry a film like the Khans of the 90s. Acting talent, at least partially, is crowd sourced from lesser platforms like reality TV and soaps, re-casting the middle class hero in 2012 in middle class roles. With the exception of Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman, Khan’s directors made him do quite the opposite.

The sly brilliance of a Bhagat and the directors that adapt his stories is that they understand the value of populism. They derive full value from the term ‘popular culture’. Kai Po Che uses the Bhuj earthquake and the Godhra massacres as backdrops, referencing them only to the point that’s comfortable to the middle class imagination. The rather sanitised depiction of the riots is a familiar itch but something no one’s willing to scratch for fear of a scab. The film never lets it get under the skin of the characters and the socio-political history that abets the riot is reduced to an emotional outburst, where the character is only looking to avenge his parents’ death, nothing more.

Admittedly, mainstream cinema is not a platform for conflict resolution. The portrayal of the Muslim minority sans caricaturisation itself is a triumph for Hindi cinema. While their blatant victimisation and dependence on the secular albeit Hindu hero isn’t exactly palatable, it’s still less unequal an equation that Bollywood is used to showing.

Political niceties aside, what burns through and pointedly so, is the entrepreneurial spirit of Gujarat. It brings to mind the other middle-class hero who has risen to now contend for the top job in the country. Narendra Modi, or Bhagat’s Parikh, is also re-casting himself in the public arena of politics. Chief Minister three times in a row, Modi has successfully created a brand of Hindutva that works on the simple theory of economic development for the majority. Kai Po Che (or for that matter Three Mistakes of My Life) also never makes an attempt to alter this set equation. It’s logic that sits well with the middle class. It’s the children of the 90s, weaned on Shah Rukh Khan’s opulent cinema, who now understand Modi’s easy and rather flawed link between money and development. Bhagat as a chronicler of our times has captured our shift rather well, be as it may in SMS literature.