A bikini is a bikini, but is the 'Pathaan' team colour blind?

To identify any particular colour with any particular religion or community is to vandalize the rainbow. You can’t snatch away a work of Nature and claim it to be your own copyrighted property. It’s like those school kids on a picnic who stand at a mountainside and claim this or that part of the vista to be theirs when they grow up.

So grow up, all you colour-‘bind’ schemers.

Having said that, I wonder if Deepika Padukone and the Pathaan team are colour blind! Why a saffron bikini in a  country where  saffron is  the symbol of  the nation? It’s like  a particular state in India insisting on  beef being their staple  diet  in a  country that worships  the cow.

Why show a red  flag to the saffron brigade? And  let  me tell you, the bikini in saffron or any other colour, looks  awful on Deepika. Can we imagine Madhubala or Waheeda Rehman in a bikini? Deepika is beautiful in the classic sense. She is tall, statuesque and best when wrapped in mystique.

She is all about enigma, and not at all about oomph. It is lugubriously transparent that Deepika wants to be Priyanka Chopra when she is clearly not cut out for the oomphy stuff.

Why do actors always want to be what they are not. Jaya Bhaduri at the  prime of  her stardom decided to glam up  for Jawani Diwani and Dil Deewana when saadgi, austerity minimalism were clearly her forte. Waheeda Rehman with her classique beauty and enrapturing elegance suddenly  got into pants and pencil heels  in Shatranj and Love In Bombay. In a delightfully confessional interview to me Waheeda confessed how horribly wrong she was for the glammed-up roles.

“But you know what happens when you have a certain amount of success. You become over-confident, especially because  you have a  dozen  people around you telling you it is okay to do anything for a big star, etc etc,” said Waheeda ji, as I applauded silently.

One day, I can envisage Mrs Ranveer Singh telling her children about the mistake made in trying to be who she  was not.

It is not the saffron we should be worried  about. It is the objectification of a beautiful woman that we should be  worried  about. When the greatest  of them all Lata Mangeshkar decided  to switch  sides  and  did an Asha  Bhosle in the seductive Aa jaane jaan, the nation swooned. She  adopted  the cabaret and made it her own.

Deepika for all her beauty and talent cannot do the same with the bikini.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.

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