Shame on us, not Katrina !

There is something terribly rotten about us. Katrina Kaif gets an award instituted in the name of Smita Patil by a private academy and all hell breaks loose. Over the last few days, I have seen reactions on social media that have ranged from being insensitive to downright terrifying. Labelled, a “wooden star”, “Barbie doll”, “Smita’s toe nail” and other unprintable things, Katrina Kaif has been subjected to much shame for absolutely no fault of hers.

What is most unsettling is the level of discourse around the entire event which displays rank insensitivity, misogyny and deep seated contempt for someone who is in no position to defend herself because she doesn’t even know her fault.

The crux of the argument is — did she land herself an award? Orchestrated it? Just because an award is named after an actress — who in fact knew the importance of commercial cinema ( All critics of Katrina please do some research on cinema history) — and surely was considered a queen of parallel cinema, does it give us a right to deride an awardee?

To say— this is an apocalypse, end of all good things about cinema — lets’ please understand that Katrina hasn’t just survived. She has ruled the industry and has been rated as one of the most commercially successful stars who continues to bag A-lister projects. Of course, none of this can happen if more than half of India’s cinema going population doesn’t love her. The argument that she has found success only because of her male counterparts is preposterous. Surely, she could have been easily replaced by anybody else but that hasn’t been the case. She has been repeatedly cast and has contributed to some of the biggest hits we have witnessed.

And she is a hardworking independent woman who was a rank outsider— didn’t understand the language or culture and emotions, so centric to Indian cinema, and has gone out to create a league of her own. You gotta be kidding if you say it’s plain fluke! It demands unimaginable sense of discipline AND consistency to stay out there and keep getting things right — again and again.

The other problem here is that we have irrationally compared Katrina and Smita’s body of work. Both the actresses belong to entirely different eras and came at very different points of Indian cinema’s evolution. Does the award specify work extraordinaire in Parallel cinema or a particular threshold of acting? It simply says the recipient has made contribution to Indian cinema and by any logic she has and has entertained the audiences worldwide. A look at most of the past awardees throws up interesting names — none of whom have carved a niche in parallel cinema like Smita did. So why did Katrina become the target of puerile ridicule?

What’s been particularly baffling is that apart from random social media users,  the score of media persons who time and again click selfies with the actress and proudly post it on their social media accounts were the first ones to pronounce judgment on the actor. Perhaps they should also look at the questions that Katrina has been asked by most of them which have never focused on her craft or her learning curve but who she is dating and why. 

Yes, we are a part of a commercial society where to drive sales it’s important to publish Katrina’s bikini pictures and print ‘scoops’ about her relationships with Salman Khan and/or Ranbir Kapoor. When we can accept the media to be a product of this commercialisation, why are we having difficulty accepting an actress who is part of our cinema  that is the product of same commercialisation?

Finally — Priyadarshani academy decided to give the award isn’t? Why didn’t people target them? But of course, it wouldn’t have been glamorous enough. Kat came in handy.

Shame is on us, not Katrina.
 
 ( The author is Associate Director, Corp Comm. and Creative, Sony Pictures Entertainment, India)