Here’s why Ekta Kapoor is not culpable
Here’s why Ekta Kapoor is not culpable
With due respect, the honourable Supreme Court gives Ekta Kapoor too much importance by holding her responsible for “polluting” young minds.
This is in relation to her cheesy downright dumb series XXX where an army man’s wife goes sexually rogue. The series and that particular story was not even worth a shred of attention. It was tacky in treatment and excruciating in execution. The stench of mediocrity was overwhelming.
More people saw it after the controversies broke out than before. This is a mistake we make over and over again. Rather than let scum slide into oblivion we foster and fuel it until it leaps into a flaming ball of fire.
Suddenly everyone is talking about something which no one had heard of earlier.
Ekta Kapoor has innumerable court cases pending against her, legal notices and FIRs from over-alert citizens who think it is their moral duty to warn us against toxic serials.
As if we don’t know! In the bid to inform the public, the offensive series get more attention than it could ever hope to get without the attention.
I remember in 2008 Ekta Kapoor had done a revisionist version of the Mahabharat. She defiantly entitled it Kahaani Mere Mahabharat Kii. Back then disgruntled citizens did not rush off legal notices and file FIRs for everything that offended them on television and satellite. Humbug litigation is a 2020s phenomenon.
When objections were raised from many quarters for the twisted interpretation of the inviolable epic Ekta had defended her right to creative freedom. “The Mahabharat is a legacy, a part of our religion and culture handed down from generation to generation. It belongs as much to me as anyone else. The only person who can challenge my right to interpret the Mahabharat is Ved Vyas, the man who wrote the epic. Luckily he isn’t around.”
Well, Ved Vyas isn’t around. But his disciplines seem to be swarming everywhere. Today all major production houses have unofficially banned all adaptations of the religious scriptures.
“When writers come to us with offers to do a mythological, we tell them we aren’t even going there…in any form. Straightforward or revisionist. All a big no,” the head honcho of a huge software company tells me.
If Ekta Kapoor’s Mahabharat were to release today I wonder what the reaction would be. She had decided to do her own take on the Mahabharat and take on the criticism from the very first episode. Ekta shot the cheer-haran chapter as a prelude to grab viewers’ attention.
The audiences’ response was negative and Ekta’s Mahabharat soon went off air. She learnt her lesson not to do mythological again. After XXX she is trying to keep away from sleaze and sex.
So what should she make that won’t offend someone or some community in some part of India or the rest of the world?
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.
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