The Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Kids: Why Aryan Khan's media trial is unfair, but hardly surprising

Scandals are the zenith of news, whether delivered on national television or whispered into your ears by a gossip-happy middle-aged person. Leave aside the specificities of a story, and pretty much everything that is sensational for a closed group of friends is stirring for the country as a whole. They say nothing is universal, but a few things come pretty close. Suspicion and judgement are perhaps key to holding together any group of individuals. No one connects as well as they do with their mutual hatred or displeasure for something. But while anyone can be judged and rejected, certain targets are softer than others.

The brouhaha around Aryan Khan’s arrest  is so predictable and formulaic, it is not even surprising anymore. So much so this whole episode borders on cliché. Maybe the film industry can turn it into a cinematic trope.

Nepotism and the devious ways of Bollywood’s rich are now perennial topics of discussion. They do not amount to anything because they are, on some level, vacuous and purposeless. Most of these debates, if you can even call it that, are started for the sake of the fires they will lead to rather than substantial change they can help incorporate. Everyone wants to fix the film industry like it is a national pet project, and not a private enterprise owned by individuals with the right to choose what they want to do.

The media, on the other hand, just wants to film a car crash, and they will go out of their way — maybe even ram one of their own vehicles into the pile-up — to make sure it is a fiery, flaming inferno straight out of hell. This incessant moralising of the film industry is not only oppressive, but it is kind of also pointless; trying to hold people to standards they are not claiming anyway.

Consequently, Aryan Khan, even before he is subjected to the barbs of nepotism, will have the ‘spoilt rich kid’ tag coming his way. Something he might never escape for the rest of his life.

Critiquing the elite is not just a culture, it is a paradigm. You want the cadavers found in a palace/bungalow to be investigated just as much as you want the couple of dead bodies discovered inside a chawl cleanly swept to the side. Even in pop culture, it is the rich who have grave and grisly secrets to hide. The poor are straightforward folk in comparison, dealing with lesser realities. Notionally, if someone has achieved success or fame, he or she has also earned the judgment of the pendulum that can swing in either direction between the extremes of love and hatred. [caption id=“attachment_8887951” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] After Rhea Chakraborty’s arrest in Sushant Singh Rajput’s death case last year, people had declared the young actor everything from a witch to a gold-digging manipulator ahead of time.[/caption] Add to that the media that just loves a good controversy, loves to pronounce guilt ahead of time, and loves even more to fan the fires that may eventually consume more than the little spark everyone could have dealt with intimately. At the end of the day, an elite celebrity caught between the ropes of life – let us be honest, we all are at some point – is a story bigger than its perceptive effects. You will be made to think nothing else is more important in the country at the moment other than a couple of kids who might have made some unwise, and typically naïve choices. It is so predictable it should not even surprise us. When the Rhea Chakraborty case broke the news last year, people had declared the young actor everything from a witch to a gold-digging manipulator ahead of time. We are avant-garde when it comes to presumptuousness. Aryan Khan, because he is a man, and because he is the son of someone we all cannot help but love, will not get the same treatment. But surely there are more important things to do than reign in a handful of elite, privileged teenagers who, regardless of their culpability, still have the means to bounce back from such setbacks. A majority of the poor, who get hooked to cheap drugs, in comparison, do not. The Indian public, in general, loves seeing an example being made out of someone. The bigger the name, the more sensational the debate around it. As if correcting palaces amounts to a trickle-down effect that is educative for middle-class households, and those even further disenfranchised. The fact is nothing about the case, the usual suspects or the argument in defence or otherwise about this episode is surprising. What is surprising is the continued relevance these incidents pretend to accrue through our conscience and salivating attention spans. For the media this is a cash cow, it plans to milk until it is arid and dry on the inside. For people, it is a glamorous debate, one they are just happy they are not close to – or will at least pretend so. Even for Khan’s family, this kind of assault in a post-Sushant Singh Rajput environment should not come as a surprise. It is perhaps going to be the model going forward. Live by the sword, or learn to live under it! Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.