'Happy New Year' is Farah Khan wishing Shah Rukh Khan, 'Happy New Body'

There is a cliché that there is no surer sign of a man going through a midlife crisis than buying a ridiculously expensive and impractical car like a two-seater Porsche. Or a Harley Davidson . But normal middle-aged men just want to feel youthful by buying an expensive toy that allows them to feel the wind blowing through their hair and forget how it’s thinning. Shah Rukh Khan however has turned into his own Porsche. In his late 40s he has retooled and refurbished his body into an unrecognizable Photoshop fantasy. “Dare you call it an attempt to induce ‘cheap thrills’ because this is the most expensive body we have,” says Farah Khan. Clearly way more work was put into the body of Shah Rukh Khan than into fleshing out the script of Happy New Year. [caption id=“attachment_1776423” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Courtesy: ibn live[/caption] Perhaps this is Farah Khan’s revenge on Bollywood’s relentless objectification of women. “We live in a sexist country where women are put down, treated badly and told that they can’t do things that men do,” she tells IANS . And then adds “I will do it and do better than a man.” And boy, does she! Happy New Year has one Deepika Padukone legging it but two male bodies – SRK and Sonu Sood - on eye-popping display. Shirts fly off. Pectorals flex. Abs ripple. The GFQ or Gratuitous Flesh Quotient is high and driven by men. Sood recalls Farah asking him “: ‘_Abhi body kaisi hai teri?_’ before casting him and Farah says “Thereafter, every hour, I used to get Sonu’s shirtless photos, which I used to instantly forward to Shah Rukh!” This is beyond bromance. While a Men’s Health and Fitness cover-worthy body has become de rigueur for every wanna-be Bollywood star, Happy New Year pushes it to new frontiers because the two men it body-worships are in their forties. Their chiseled bodies become a sort of bionic defiance of the forces of nature and gravity, at least from the neck down. Of course it only works as a career upswing for men. Bipasha Basu, who is in her mid-thirties, is doing horror films not Diwali blockbusters. Of the three big Khans, Shah Rukh had in a way seemed more immune to the trap of the body beautiful. While Salman quickly adopted the muscle boy avatar and Aamir was a QSCutie, Shah Rukh developed his own image that was partly goofball, partly boy-next door, very physical but not about physique. He had the best chance to age gracefully. But as he grew older, his anxiety about his desirability as a star has become increasingly tied up with his own body image. Om Shanti Om was a six-pack reinvention but a conscious one, deliberately done for the film. In Ra One he had to look like a super hero. In Happy New Year that ten-pack is there not because the script demands it but because its 48-year-old owner wants to prove that he can have it, age no bar. Happy New Year should have really been called Happy New Body. Shah Rukh is hardly alone in this obsession with the body. Gyms and personal trainers are hot business and every gym locker room is full of men sharing notes about the best online sites for protein supplements and pills. Young men in their twenties show up at hair replacement clinics because they have lost their hair alarmingly thanks to indiscriminate steroid use. It is not necessarily about fitness or even strength. Now it’s about the body as a work of sculpture, it’s about polishing every little muscle for public adulation. Salman would just take off his shirt, puff up his chest and fight. Shah Rukh rises like a male Venus from the mud in HNY and the camera longingly lingers on an extreme close-up of first one nipple, before lovingly panning over to the other one. This is love. A couple of years ago I remember interviewing 100-year-old body builder Manohar Aich, India’s first Mr. Universe at his home in Kolkata. Aich would go to his little akhara well into his 90’s. His relationship with his body, while admiring, was completely different and more at ease. That’s because his body was his life’s work. “I did it because I had the ichhe (desire),” he said. “Now it’s all wrong. They just want quick results? Is it possible?” Shah Rukh Khan shows that it is possible. If you have the right high-priced trainers and the private gym and the time to devote to it. As a friend puts it Shah Rukh is more about vanity and Aich is more about pride. That also makes Shah Rukh Khan a better fit for our consumer society while Aich is an anachronism. The body is a product that can be bought like other status symbols. Aich is a symbol of dogged persistence, a man who supported himself by working in circuses lifting 600 kilos on his 4’11’ frame and eating stir-fried innards because that’s all the protein he could afford. We do not want that. Even his son does not want that. He wants a chain of air-conditioned gyms, named after his father of course. Shah Rukh reassures us that we can aspire to that body without that kind of lifelong investment. “You don’t get a body from machines,” said Kshitij Chatterjee, a disciple of Aich’s and Mr. India 1966. “You get a body maathar ghaam paaye pheley (by the sweat of your brow). We were natural body builders. Our guru was Manohar Aich. Now the guru is the druggist.” But where does this road finally lead? A six-pack can be one-upped by an eight-pack and then by a ten-pack. And then what? As Aseem Chhabra wonders in Quartz while his film rakes in the big bucks what does it do for Shah Rukh, the actor who will soon turn 50? His body defies time but time will not stop for him. “I show my body so that you all can look within and touch the soul. Do not just focus on my body, look into my heart and connect with the soul,” says Shah Rukh Khan. But there’s no evidence of much soul-searching in Happy New Year. Even though Shah Rukh, as promised, gives Deepika Padukone first billing, it does not change anything very much in how it treats women or any other group. His character disses Padukone’s Mohini as a cheap dancer over and over again and she still keeps falling for him, believing his lame apologies. The gay caricatures prance around with feather boas. The Parsees lisp. Shah Rukh Khan is an intelligent man even ready to poke fun at himself as his appearance on the Viral Fever on Barely Speaking with Arnub proves. “(H)ow does someone like him compromise all his intelligence to produce and star in a film like HNY that offends women, gays, and Parsis in so many ways?” asks Chhabra. The body changes but everything inside the package remains as regressive and mindless and cliché-prone as ever. And thus Happy New Year becomes same old wine in a new body.