28 June 2019 15:01 IST

If you haven’t seen ‘Kabir Singh’ yet, you have shown extreme good sense

Against my best instincts, I decided to watch Kabir Singh. Well, ₹500 from me to the cinema industry and nothing, nada, zilch for me. If you want to watch it, then cease reading now because I’ll probably leak the plot, if we might dignify it with that word.

First things first — this is a hollow film. You know how if you tie up some empty tins, they make a lot of noise? It’s like that. There’s a lot of alcohol, drugs, four-letter words, rage and so on but at its core there’s nothing. Boy-meets-girl, much-ado, boy-gets-girl.

So why is it raking it in at the box-office? Because the film makes complete sense to a certain kind of young Indian male demographic today. Men who need the kind of reassurance this film gives — that their brand of violence, their contempt for women, for law and order, civic values and moral codes is just fine.

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Misogyny is only one part of a certain kind of overall male anarchy the film revels in. The movie doesn’t hold a mirror to this mindless celebration of masculinity; it becomes the celebration.

Kabir Singh is an extraordinarily ill-mannered, arrogant, foul-tempered, pathologically violent young man. Very early on, he beats an opponent to pulp on the football field. The frightening thing is not that he does it — after all, the film intends to establish his anger issues — but that Kabir then gets to lecture the dean on ethics and the class is asked to cheer the “hero”. It’s like the killers of Ikhlaq and Tabrez Ansari teaching us about nationalism and getting a standing ovation.

The film does this repeatedly. In one disturbing scene, Kabir chases his housekeeper down the stairs because she breaks a glass. The director seems to think this is funny. Kabir treats his nursing staff like menials. Nobody minds. He strolls in and out of the girls’ hostel. Nobody complains. He’s a hooligan, but nobody acknowledges it. What is the value system of this film? What is its ethical core?

The slightest shift in perspective in any of the above scenes, a twitch, a pause, a look — and the film’s stance could have been clearly established. But the choices it makes are deliberate — the film wants us to believe vicious rowdies are just angry little teddy bears. Because if you can love passionately, then you can be all kinds of trash.

It’s this insidious intent that is troubling. That Kabir Singh is a misogynist is unsurprising, but the film slyly makes his girlfriend Preeti a willing supplicant to his misogyny. The movie isn’t set in a remote village where the landlord takes his pick of helpless peasant women. It’s a medical college in New Delhi in 2019. Kabir publicly announces that he “owns” Preeti. He tells her where to sit. He picks her friends. In one particularly awful Holi scene, he announces that nobody must colour her white clothes except him — the implication is obvious. Preeti allows it all, with demure acquiescence.

By co-opting Preeti, the film wants you to believe that women actually want abusive, obsessive love. In fact, there are scenes to establish that Kabir is fighting for Preeti’s rights. It’s a clever, clever move.

Towards the end, when Kabir finally confesses to alcoholism and loses his licence, you wonder if the film might just redeem itself. But at that point the two meet again, and the vacuous Preeti weepingly tells Kabir that her husband has not even touched her once. Hallelujah! Obsessive lover-boy gets his woman back, purity intact, even though he has been sleeping in the interim with everything that moves.

I wish men would grow up. And I wish cinema would stop putting Band-Aid on their massive male egos. The obsession with the rejected male lover and his sorrow is endless. I wonder if anyone will ever make a film about a woman coping with heartbreak. That would be unlikely. You see, women cope silently, without fuss. They’ll bathe the kids and feed the family and nobody will even know the grief. They don’t become dramatic drunks or grow a beard or become promiscuous to drown their sorrows, so how would anyone build a three-hour monument to it?

Where the writer tries to make sense of society with seven hundred words and a bit of snark