Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s movie Padmaavat is allegedly based on Alauddin Khilji’s conquest of the Chittor fort and Rani Padmavati’s subsequent self-immolation to protect herself from Khilji. Apart from being a fictional depiction of history, as claimed by Bhansali himself, it has also become a one stop outrage and rampage hub for a section of the Indian populace.
Ever since the movie Padmaavat (Padmavati, as it was earlier known) was announced, certain groups like Karni Sena have ganged up against the movie by alleging that it distorts Rajput history. This protest has incidentally been going for so long that, some might wonder whether the movie script, or the manual to distort history as Karni Sena might describe it, was even ready back then.
The protest has since its inception, transformed from vandalising movie sets to torching, stoning vehicles, and wrecking shops inside multiplexes.
With such spates of violence being reported from around the country, OpIndia decided to send a ground reporters to find out what exactly is going on, and why the protesters are so angry.
We quickly tracked down one group of protesters, who were running on the street with the essential toolkit to destroy public property. This toolkit generally comprises of bringing sticks, stones, petrol and most importantly, leaving one’s brain back home.
It was noted that the group was moving with vigour and frenzied purpose. We also noticed that one person in the group was so angry against Padmavaat, that he had single-handedly managed to set a couple of buses ablaze. It was also noticed that he was carrying a “Padmaavat Murzabad” poster where he had incidentally got the spelling of Padmaavat wrong.
When he finally decided to catch his breath, we approached him and questioned the motive behind his madness. Surprisingly he was ready to talk and claimed that he was angered when he was told that Bhansali was trying to distort his community’s legacy.
This seems to have provided him a fertile medium to channel his outrage, and he claimed that he was so consumed by the hatred for the movie that he replaced his Good Morning messages on WhatsApp with “Ashamed of Sanjay Leela Bhansali, death to his movie”.
We asked him to show the messages which he regularly sent to his friends and family. There too we noticed that he was spelling the name of the movie wrong and out of curiosity questioned him about the same.
He was very surprised and soon started contesting that the he is correct and it is us who are in the wrong. After he was provided sufficient proofs regarding the same, he blurted out that he might have made a mistake since he wasn’t too aware about the whole issue.
We then questioned him whether his anger peaked today after he watched the movie, rendering him filled with uncontrollable rage? To this he laughed at us and started giving us a lecture that money doesn’t grow on trees. It was later found out that he was planning on going to the movie in the second week, when the tickets would be cheaper.
There too he might be in for a rude shock after, as per exclusive information, one protester who was inside the theatre to break things at the end of the movie, fell asleep midway after finding the movie too boring.
Author’s note: The above piece is a work of satire, though the points made might ring true in a broader scheme of things
