Jokes Apart | How Ranveer Singh’s was a fairly ordinary photoshoot
Jokes Apart | How Ranveer Singh’s was a fairly ordinary photoshoot
Poor Ranveer Singh. The nation has a problem when he wears clothes — too flamboyant and outlandish, and when he doesn’t — a birthday suit is not really a suit.
Most manufactured controversies involving Indian celebrities can be understood using the Beauty and the Beast binary. Ranveer, say his defenders, was not portraying the masculine beast here; he was, instead, a vulnerable laddish beauty personified. The excitement about Lalit Modi and Sushmita Sen being boyfriend-girlfriend also revolved around this binary. I will refrain from saying who was the beast here and who the beauty, because beauty, as the cliché goes, lies in the spectacles of the beholder. There is an old joke about the subjectivity of beauty. A newly married couple steps out for a walk; some boys loitering nearby shout out, “Beauty and the beast.” This happens every evening, until one day when the newly married man’s patience runs thin. He turns around and ticks the boys off, “Stop calling my wife a beast.”
Jokes apart, it’s been difficult to ignore Ranveer’s antics the past month or so. First he went looking for an exotic flower for his wife, Deepika, all the way to Serbia. The highlight of the show was the geeli pappis he planted on host, Papa Bear Grylls. He then appeared on the new season of Koffee with Karan, a show which is known for creating its own kind of binary: Bollywood stars, whose workplace language is Hindi, speak only in English. Once I was watching it with an American friend who asked me in innocent puzzlement: “But why don’t they speak in Indian?” While “Indian” might be one of the greatest languages Indians don’t speak, the question did have something to it. KJo’s show removes the actors from their massy bread and butter context and locates them in the VIP lounge of the ‘classes’. Ranveer did his manic life-of-the-party thing, where he takes over the conversation by cutting through the niceties.
Ranveer’s appearance on KJo’s show was followed by the news that he’d bought some super expensive real estate in Bandra, so expensive that it boasts of nineteen parking spots. While the nation was chewing on this priceless nugget, he dropped the in-the-buff photo shoot, which literally jumped off the Page. Then came the FIRs. As Yo Yo Honey Singh had warned us in a hit single some years ago: “Aunty police bula legi.”
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Filing an FIR comes naturally to Indians. We wake up ready to be offended. We are primed to do so. In this regard, we have always been “woke”. We teach our children how to file an FIR before they have even learnt their ABC. When they leave school, our kids might not have many life skills or actually useful academic training but they know one thing well: How to take offence and take legal recourse. Of course, after the controversy snowballed, the debate became something else entirely: What is the definition of a human bum?
There was some serious anatomical shifting that took place. Skeletons were pulled out of medical school labs, as everyone tried to figure out as to what actually constitutes a bum. Or is it rather the flank, the outline of a thigh...there still is no clarity. One complainant insisted that when he zoomed in he could see everything. I couldn’t see beauty, beast or bum.
In fact, when I read the Page magazine interview (where it all began), for a moment I thought I was reading the dialogue from Gehraiyaan, a film on Amazon Prime, where Indians go swimming in an ocean of four letter words. Yachts capsize on- screen but waves of eff-you’s keep crashing on the hapless beach bum viewer. Sample this excerpt from Ranveer’s interview: “I work f***king hard. I want to wear nice sh*t. Eat my f*****g a**, I will wear nice f*****g shit. I bust my balls, I work 20-hour days. I’m not complaining — I’m only too happy and grateful — but I go f******g hard. I will f******g buy Gucci, I will wear it from head to toe. Anyone who judges me can eat my f*****g a**.” I saw stars after reading this. Bollywood needs a crash course in how to use the f-word in English sentences or they better stick to speaking in Indian.
Still, it’s good that these controversies happen because it forces the Indian middle class to talk about nudity. Our only experience of nudity in society is the embarrassed dash we sometimes have to make from the bathroom to the balcony and back, when we have forgotten to take the towel from the clothes rack. Aside from this, our experience of nudity comes via religion. Ranveer being nangu baba is not kosher, but the Naga baba in the Kumbh is. Growing up in Allahabad, I would often see a naked mendicant walking down the muddy streets in the monsoon. No one would even bat an eyelid. Even the children didn’t giggle.
We also have a rubber-band approach to nudity. Perhaps more pyjama strings. We loosen it, then we tighten it. There’s been a fair bit of male nudity in our cinema: John Abraham in Dostana, R Rajkumar Rao in Shahid, Ranbir Kapoor in Saawariya, Neil Nitin Mukesh in Jail, and Randeep Hooda in Rang Rasiya. And then there are the gay sex scenes in Zoya Akhtar’s anthology film, Made in Heaven.
In fact, from the 2000s on, a very butch male aesthetic took over the covers of our movie magazines and cinema screens. Buff, waxed chests and big biceps (from Hrithik to Salman) became the norm, very different from Colin Firth’s chest, universally accepted by women as the most swoon-worthy without being offensive. When Shahid Kapoor ran topless with white horses in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Kaminey, the women in the multiplex wouldn’t stop whistling, oohing, aahing. I was there. It’s no coincidence that this new male erotic aesthetic was conceived and executed by homosexual professionals in the industry; Indian women lapped it up. It was their coming- out party too.
To sum up, Ranveer’s was a fairly ordinary photoshoot. Indians have this darzee mentality; we are experts at copying. Get hold of a pair of Levis originals, then churn out a million copies. We like to pass off this copycat culture as a case of “My tribute to”, “my ode to”. In Ranveer’s case, we are told, this was “inspired by” Burt Reynold’s shoot for Cosmopolitan in 1972. In some photos, he seems to be hamming some classical Indian dance mudras. The others don’t go beyond the pictures of male models printed on every pack-of-two underwear, available in every nook and cranny of India.
Finally, spare a thought for the only prop in the shoot — the carpet, who took it all without flinching. If I was in the carpet’s place I would have either upped and flown away to Baghdad, or wrapped myself tightly around Ranveer, covering every inch of his body, sorry, bum.
The writer is the author of ‘The Butterfly Generation’ and the editor of ‘House Spirit: Drinking in India’. Views expressed are personal.
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