Bollywood's botox bubble of denial

by Sandip Roy Finally a rare moment of real honesty from a film star. Tollywood’s Sabyasachi Chakravarty has made quite a career out of playing Felu-da, Satyajit Ray’s intrepid Bengali detective. Well, intrepid in a very Bengali sort of way, i e he spends a lot of time doing mental gymnastics. But he does occasionally sprint down alleys and jump up from the floor. Now Chakravarty says that after five Felu-da feature films, and ten telefilms, he’s planning to call it a day. “The main problem is my paunch,” the fifty-five year old actor told The Telegraph . Chakravarty’s latest Felu-da adventure, Royal Bengal Rahasya, directed by Ray’s son Sandip, is about to release soon.  He says he’s unsure what the audience will make of him. “I know they will say ‘Feluda thik ache (is OK)  but his paunch is an eyesore’, and I am ready for it. I know my paunch is an eyesore. So, I think it’s time for me to call it quits.” [caption id=“attachment_88068” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“SRK is trying to become a superhero, the last bastion of the ageless star. Raju Shelar/Firstpost”] [/caption] Now when was the last time you heard something that candid from one of our Bollywood stars? The middle-aged college student Why can’t our stars allow themselves to age?  They know they are aging. The audience knows they are aging. But the myth of Bollywood creates a sort of Botox bubble of denial where our stars creak on forever, and ever and ever. (The heroine turnover, of course, is much quicker.) It seems we are afraid that if the stars of our teen years age onscreen we’ll have to admit our own middle age as well. Instead in the darkness of the theater we create a Peter Pan Neverland where the good times never have to stop as long as there’s enough make-up and soft focus. In the old days it was particularly egregious. Dev Anand’s collars climbed higher, while his scarves and primly buttoned shirts and sweaters tried to hide the march of wrinkles. But the Evergreen hero gamely romanced on moving from Tina Munim to Padmini Kohlapuri. Dev saab was at least dapper and relatively well-preserved. Raj Kapoor, on the other hand, looked quite the tired old roué when he romanced a fresh-faced Hema Malini in Sapnon ka Saudagar. Then there was Manoj Kumar who decided that in his 50s he could play a college kid in Clerk.  These days the stars have a longer shelf-life. They go to the gym, they take their protein supplements, they talk to magazines endlessly about their diets. What they don’t realise is it might make them fitter, but not younger. It just turns them into strangely bionic men, with aging faces grafted onto ageless bodies. (Remember Shah Rukh in Om Shanti Om?) It also feeds into the fantasy that they can be teen idols forever, that youth is all about the six-pack, rather than the Brat pack. Aamir Khan had crossed 40 when he told us he was an angry young post-grad student in Rang de Basanti. That worked well, at least well enough, for him to come back as a 21-year-old 44-year-old in 3 Idiots. If his nephew Imran Khan hadn’t come on the scene, chances are he’d still be trying to pull those roles off. Sanjay Dutt, many kilos removed from his skinny Rocky debut, ambled through Munnabhai over two-decades later as a  middle-aged med student. Shah Rukh Khan basically had to be booted out of his cute aww shucks college-kid persona by a new generation of actors who were actually closer to college-going age. And now at 45, SRK is trying to become a superhero, the last bastion of the ageless star. Superman, we all know, never grows old. Continues on the next page And Rajnikanth, well, he’s just Rajni, existing in some stratosphere, ungoverned by normal rules of time and space. Salman Khan, bless his biceps, apparently declined a role saying he was too old for it. Old is gold except when you are old But even when they do allow themselves to age, our stars can’t quite shake their own dashing image of themselves. Amitabh Bachchan might have let his beard go grey but he still wants to be the rakish old man,  bbuddah hoga tera baap. Of course Bbuddah Hoga Tera Baap tanked at the box office proving that the audience isn’t buying the dashing Daddy image anymore. We can’t just blame Bollywood. Hollywood has its share of mutton passing as lamb. A grizzled Clint Eastwood nuzzled Rene Russo in Line of Fire. By the end of his Bond stint, mid-fiftyish Roger Moore was looking a little puffy. Ralph Macchio wasn’t quite the  kid anymore by the time we got to Karate Kid III. [caption id=“attachment_88077” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Amitabh Bachchan in Bbuddah hoga tera baap. Image ibnlive.in.com”] [/caption] We are all on the same treadmill. We are all being peddled the same anti-aging creams. In a country where more than 65% of the population is below 35, everyone talks about aging gracefully. But no one wants to do it. My mother simpers with pleasure when her doctor tells her “You don’t look your age at all. You look at least 15 years younger.” But then as she tries to get up, she sighs “Well that’s nice. But I feel it in my bones.” But my mother is not pretending to be a thirty-something femme fatale and asking the world to shell out money to believe in that fantasy. A Bollywood star is doing a job. A well-paid job. And he holds onto that job, long past the expiry date. In a way it’s just highlighting a larger societal problem. These days India is all about the young, the youth market, the young demographic. Our ads, our films, our gadgets all trumpet this. But sociologist Ashis Nandy points out that life expectancy is also increasing in India. “The younger are often earning more money and hold higher posts,” he says. “But don’t forget the elders can also stick onto the post much longer. If you are heading an empire children can no longer hope to inherit it as easily, and as early as they used to. So it cuts both ways.” And that holds true for the Bollywood empire. Our middle-aged demi-gods want to cling on to those young lover boy roles because they think all it needs is a hundred more push-ups, a toupee and a little bit of steroids. If a six-pack doesn’t cut it, surely an 8-pack will do the trick. All hail the paunch On the other hand Sabyasachi Chakravarty, instead of sucking in that paunch, says he’s ready for his next innings. He says he’ll play the roles of fathers, tarpor buroder roles (then roles of old men). He apparently understands that there is a fine line between the audience saying “Why is Sabyasachi not playing Felu-da anymore?” and “Why is Sabyasachi still playing Felu-da?” It’s high time some of his fellow stars figured out that difference. Surely, they are old enough.