Chennai Express, the latest Shah Rukh Khan starrer is well on its way to becoming a Rs200 crore mega hit, in the process reinforcing the power of the Khan brand and also sadly Bollywood’s inability to depart from its decades old formula of success—dole out a light, frothy time-pass. So what if the country grapples with a rupee in freefall and all of its concomitant consequences. The only economics Bollywood understands is the money the stars make. Such slightly complex issues as the current account deficit or the falling rupee are clearly beyond the decoding skills of the moguls of mainstream cinema in India.

As part of our popular culture, films are expected to mirror the obsessions of the viewers. That they would do so while seeking to entertain at the same time, is the creative challenge for an artist. From Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times to a clutch of recent movies about the financial crisis, Hollywood has shown how it is done. In Margin Call, for instance, a thrilling and thought-provoking movie that focused on a 24-hour period in an investment bank reminiscent of the sinking Lehman Brothers during the height of the crisis. There have been others: The Company Men, which takes a look at the impact of unemployment on the lives of people following the financial crisis or the even the painful-to-watch Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps which may have been a sequel well past its sell by date when it was released but did deal with the very hubris that took down the financial institutions that had been touted as “too big to fail".

A closer look has of course come from documentaries like Inside Job or the pre-bust era Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders, and the more straightforward American Casino which dissected the subprime mortgage crisis.

But even a cursory look at recent Bollywood releases, from the erotic thriller Nasha to a supposed laughter riot Bajatey Raho or the grammatically-challenged Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai Dobara, shows how Mumbai’s prolific film-making factory finds it impossible to churn out anything more relevant than the usual bhaigiri or the latest obsession with deep North villainy.

Part of the reason may be the lack of engaging books and stories dealing with India’s various economic issues—scams or crises. We either have the dry academic treatise by economists and political scientists or fiction which is either too personal and anecdotal or actually borrowed from the masala movies of Mumbai. Lacking in source material that clearly delineates our economic faultlines, our film-makers revert to type.

While through the 1960s and 1970s, the political mood of the nation and the transitional stage in our national identity was captured by a clutch of excellent film-makers, the similar seminal change in our economic narrative post 1992 has found no takers. Even the surge of optimism in the new middle classes, an optimism which has given way to a darker and more desperate mood over the last few years, finds no reflection in the cinema from Mumbai. Producing 1,000 films annually, that generate revenue of over $3 billion, it is a large integral part of our economy. But despite feeding off the success of this economy which now allows film-makers to participate in its growth (the industry’s gross receipts have almost tripled since 2004), it makes little attempt to interpret, analyse or even depict its concerns.

All cinema is, in a sense, a form of escapism, taking us to worlds outside our immediate horizon, allowing us to “imagine with other imaginations" as C.S. Lewis so memorably put it. Yet it is also a means to understand our times, to provide us an epiphany for forces shaping our lives. The lives of ordinary and even the not-so-ordinary Indians are being affected by global forces like the threatened withdrawal of a stimulus by the US Federal Reserve or the impact on oil prices of the new shale gas reserves. The current struggle and strife in our education system is an attempt to induct more context into it, to make it more relevant to our age. It is a relevance that we neither seem to expect from nor find in the mindless entertainment that is being churned out in our cinema.

Work, the central metaphor of our society, is what our fictional stories seek to replace with the family node that is increasingly losing relevance. Work is the exchange value of human commerce but in our films we see flaky child-like representations of it. Bollywood, if not regional cinema, persists with its dangerously cretinous escapism, perpetuating fictional narratives that do not reflect our economic realities and complexities.

Is cinema a form of escapism? Tell us at views@livemint.com

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