Tu mera hero: Spare the Salman Khan fans, we're a country with absurd role models

Did you hear a collective cry of anguish ripple through the country as a judge in Mumbai sentenced Salman Khan to prison for five years?

Did you want to bang your head on your work-desk, as ‘fans’ swarmed around television reporters, offering to go to jail on behalf of ‘bhai’, displaying that they are hardly more intelligent than a broccoli?

Did you wonder if there should be a law making stupidity a punishable offence as Farah Khan Ali and singer Abhijeet’s tweets surfaced on your timeline and you figured that hundreds of people agreed with them? Did you suddenly feel that you’d rather be in Jurassic Park than in this country, as all the pyaar, ishq, mohabbat, punched you on your face?

If you did, you probably belong to my tribe. And you need to calm down and not overreact.

So what are the common arguments defending Khan and expressing horror at the fact that he, of all people, should go to jail? Much has been said about how great a human being Salman Khan is. That belief is being considered fact and being widely cited by those demanding Khan be sent right back to the sets of Bajraangi Bhaijaan, so that he can break a few more bones. In a film, of course.

That apart, there were ones who brought up the fact that the incident occurred so long ago and Khan is such a different man now that he shouldn’t be made to pay the price for what he did in his youth. It’s like saying you shouldn’t be nicknamed Little Mermaid now because you wore flared-bottom denims while in college a decade back.

It also does not account for the fact that the case dragged on as long as it did because Khan’s lawyers did their best to delay and procrastinate.

“Ab jaane bhi do,” the country seems to be saying like an indulgent grandmother, getting the back of a truant teen. Khan is a better man, he has made up for the mishap by Being Human. (In fact, he came up with a solution for people with bad taste and shopping addiction minus the moolah. He gave you the desi answer to LV bag.)

And finally, he never intended to kill that man. Poor thing, he just drank a little more than usual. And instead of us lesser mortals who end up hugging a toilet seat all night, he just ran over a man. Surely, he shouldn’t be spotted chakki peesing, for that one drunken escapade?

But wait, where have you heard these arguments before? Was it in the last general election? Was in it every election you have seen in this country? Oh, yes!

Let’s look at the governments in this country. The one we have now has been formed by a party, which among other things, is accused at worst of complicity in riots or at best doing precious little to contain them. According to official records, the 2002 Gujarat riots killed 1,000 people at least. Now don’t charge at me denying the BJP’s involvement in the riots. Maya Kodnani, a BJP MLA and minister has been convicted in the case. Kodnani was a free woman for 11 years, till she was convicted in 2013, alongside several others. India, unanimously voted for the party, making it a single majority party in a long time in India’s history. It’s as if we yawned, ‘raat gayi, baat gayi’ and decided to move on.

What was the government we had for for a decade before this? It was led by a party, which is believed to have let loose a riot that killed nearly 2,800 people. It is widely believed that it was enraged Congress supporters who ran amok killing Sikhs, after Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. No Congress minister has yet been jailed in those riots. Some have handily won re-election despite being accused of being heavily involved in the riots. It’s been more than 30 years since the massacre took place. Yet, we voted the party to power to head the country, several times in the following years. We know how to move on.

So, yes, we are a country which doesn’t hold grudges for too long. As long as one of us was not in the receiving end of any form of violence. And as is the norm in any civilised society, the ratio of people who have faced violence will always be a sliver compared to the ones who haven’t. Shock dissipates in India faster that the froth on our beer does.

By those standards, no wonder people think Salman Khan is only as evil as Tom in Tom and Jerry. And as forgivable as Hulk.

Add to that, how much we love our heroes. Or mostly importantly, how compelled we feel to have someone to moon and swoon over, to give a human face to a great warrior-savior, mostly male, macho and glib talking. From our political ‘heroes’, who promise to ferry us from bad times to good, to our screen ‘heroes’ who show us how to save a woman, fight corruption and beat up baddies, we just have the most overblown role supermodels imaginable. We show our faith in them with our votes, or with our money on opening weekend.

So how different are Salman Khan’s fans from a huge majority of Indians? In reality much of India lives in the same glasshouse as Salman Khan’s irate fans. They just have different Salman Khans on their pedestals.