Oct 31, 2016

Very Mushqil

Sarabjeet D. Natesan

As a young first year student in Mrs Malhotra’s Microeconomics class at Delhi University, the first lesson I learnt was that of Opportunity Cost. Explained through the ever popular Guns and Butter analogy, it made me understand that there is a cost attached to everything you do in life. And that is what you give up to do it. To make it easier to understand, If you have two choices – either an apple or an orange – and you choose the apple, then your opportunity cost is the orange you could have chosen but didn’t. You gave up the opportunity to take the orange in order to choose the apple.

Sadly, I did not learn this lesson for life. At the insistence of my children. I am a repeat habitual offender. I do not learn from my previous mistakes.

Now if we are assigning blame, I wish somebody had forced Karan Johar to attend Mrs Malhotra’s Microeconomics class instead of Miss Briganza’s Literature class on Romeo and Juliet. Maybe, just maybe, we would have been spared the drivel called ADHM. First of all, it sounds like some kind of a disorder. (Let me tell you that the viewers definitely come out of the theatre with a mental disorder.)

Growing up (once again), we were told that going to ‘vilayat’ was the dream of every respectable Punjabi. Vilayat being Eenglaand. Getting the British visa involved tales of heroic and mythological proportions. Once you were lucky enough to get into Eenglaand you had to find work there, for you see, no one feeds you, clothes you, provides you alcohol, and gives you foreign trips, for free.

UNLESS you are a character in KJo’s movies and you just happen to meet a super-rich boy whom you try to rescue from the clutches of money grabbing dumb yet a smart beautiful girl who does a number on your educated yet stupid MBBS (could be) match fixed by your father all the way from Lucknow.

Then, of course, I know of no one luckier than Ayan Sanger. From one friendly beauty to another bombshell beauty, who is waiting with bated breath to get a call from a much younger guy whom she met on a flight! Obviously, the great Amitabh Bachchan is irritated with his bahu. I would be too. I think Ms Saba did this role just to spite her in-laws.

Then, of course, there is this whole cancer angle. Once again in the days of yore, filmmakers would make characters get cancer, consumption, make them deliver babies without showing them pregnant, make two flowers touch to allude to a kiss metaphorically. I think Karan Johar has grown up watching the same movies. However, there are no flowers here only physical relations, binge drinking, characters with the emotional intelligence of a teaspoon are all there and yet KJo falls back on a simple homespun tale of getting rid of vital characters by giving them some vague cancer to move the story forward. My Goodness, Anushka looks a very well taken care of cancer patient at the end stage. I wish the cancer society had thought of protesting against the movie rather than the MNS.

Karan Johar is a smart man. He knew right from the word go that there is nothing in this movie except the tension of signing Fawad Khan. He must have gone to at least ten temples, and a few mosques, thanking his lucky stars for the foresight to have signed Fawad Khan. Instead of grovelling and getting tons and tons of free publicity playing the hapless victim, he could have easily re-shot the five and half second long minuscule scenes with another actor. But then the movie would have completely flopped. As it should rightly have.

To come back to Opportunity Cost, I wish KJo had used the time and money and resources and etc. to do something else. As should have I, first watching the movie and wasting my time and missing out on a great Diwali party and then taking the past half an hour to write about it. I wish that after this, he will leave the difference between Friendship and Love alone. He is thoroughly confusing the younger and for that matter even the older (Ms Saba types) generations!

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