Dear Twinkle Khanna,
I have known and liked you from before you met Akshay Kumar. I always enjoyed speaking to you. Your ability to cut to the chase even back then—we are talking about the late 1990s—was admirable. After you married Akshay we kept in touch. I didn’t want to lose my connectivity with you.
I remember a memorable lunch at your place where you had invited my daughter and I during our visit to Mumbai. Your son Aarav then a toddler, was running around the room.
In recent years you have turned your USP—outspokenness—into a huge asset. The media loves you, because you are a captivating clickbait.Your iconoclastic comments get the required results, each time.
But this time the joke is on you. Responding to the massive success of Vivek Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files with the parodic proposal of making a film called ‘The Nail Files’ about a ‘disastrous manicure’ is a very ‘South Mumbai’ thing to do.
I know . You don’t live in South Mumbai. It isn’t about physical location.South Mumbai is a state of mind , a condition of supreme insulation from the reality of the real world.
You clearly have no clue about what happened to lakhs of Kashmiri Pandits in the 1990s when overnight they were rendered homeless, if not lifeless by militants. If you had any understanding of the genocidal complexities of the situation you wouldn’t joke about it.
Would you wisecrack about making a ‘Grocery List’ inspired by Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List? No. That’s because the jew holocaust has been injected into our subconscious over generations by great cinema and literature.
The poor Kashmiri Pandits had no recorded historical data , let alone any work of art , to back up their claims of pain until now. The Genocide Files were never exposed until now.Your discomfort with the truth—how can you ingest the fact that lakhs were massacred and no one blinked?—is understandable.
The narrative of Islamophobia is being thrusted on the film by the South Mumbai mentality. By the elitist reckoning of ‘Good Cinema’ Muslims must not be shown as terrorists. The minute you do that you are Islamophobic.I know how uncomfortable Vivek Agnihotri’s film makes you, specially now when it has swallowed your husband’s film Bachchan Pandey wholesale.
Many more imbecilic empires will fall. The audience has tasted the truth.Bitter as it is, they would rather face up to the sobering truth than live in the dreamworld Bollywood has created over the years.
It is time to wake up and smell the the coffee. Happy brewing.
Subhash K Jha
