Truly Devdas

Salman Khan is a victim of love destroyed. His problems began with Bhansali’s proposal to film Sarat Chandra’s story about Devdas. Much that Salman has done, or that has happened to him, during the last year is a kind of a rebuff to his ex-friend Sanjay Leela Bhansali. It was film director Bhansali who started it off when he did not cast Salman in his third film, because Bhansali believed that Salman was not the best actor to portray Devdas. Since then Salman Khan has gone on to prove that he is actually as self-destructive as Sarat Chandra’s Devdas, and that Bhansali was wrong about him.

Aishwarya Rai, one can now see with hindsight, was a lucky charm for Salman. As long as the love story of his life was running smoothly, Salman was having a cushy time. Now that the halo of love, and luck, has been lost, Salman is in all kinds of self-created problems. Like a jilted lover he is bent on proving the immortality of his love by destroying himself – going into the wilderness and shooting blackbucks, turning physical against the lady love when she got bored with his charms, indulging in street-side behavior that led the police to provide a security guard to the beautiful Aiswarya, driving a car after getting drunk. His behavior in the last two years has bordered on the suicidal. A real life instance of a tragic love story.

In such, perhaps, do we have an opportunity to understand how the tragic love stories of Heer-Ranjha, Romeo and Juliet, Shireen-Farhad and Laila-Majnu came about –to know exactly how tragic romantic dramas occur in real life. Like those archetypal lovers, Salman was rejected from attaining the blissful state of love fulfilled. Media reports have said that Aishwarya’s family was against a marriage between the two. Maybe that is not the comprehensive story of the split? Maybe Aishwarya was no longer in love with him any more and asked her parents to step in and keep Romeo away? Maybe Salman was not considered for the role of Devdas by ex-buddy Bhansali, because the film director could sense that the vibes between the actor and the actress had turned unromantic?

So, Salman turned into a Devdas in real life! Rejected in love, he felt he had nothing sensible to live for. No doubt, it will take a jail term for him to get over it. At the moment he is truly rejected by society. The only people who have come out in his support are the social workers of three non-governmental organizations at Mumbai – the Cancer Patients Aid Association, the Make-A-Wish Foundation and Ashray. While the first two organizations work among terminally ill children, Ashray is an organization that works for children and women infected with AIDS. All three are indebted to Salman for the quality time he has spent with terminally ill children and AIDS patients.

So there is a side to Salman Khan that we did not know of! The Bollywood media certainly didn’t; and the reason it did not was because Salman hid this side of his life from the outside world. Most of Mumbai’s film stars are extremely secretive about the charities they support or the causes they work for in their private life. I once spotted a famous film star at a spastic center but was immediately sworn to secrecy for the rest of my life. The film star’s argument being that if you let the world know about it, then your work becomes a publicity thing and you are cashing it for reasons of your public image.

They live in such a mercenary, opportunistic, publicity world that when a film star actually does something for his or her own self, or his or her own beliefs, the last thing the film star desires is any publicity about it. In their world, publicity immediately sucks the good work into their peculiar business world and colors it as an image-building exercise; which corrodes the sense of goodness that the film star may have felt. Such also are the reasons why a Bollywood star’s family will avoid public appearances, or why most of them will not issue denials when the gossip columns write about a marriage being on the rocks. Irrespective of what is published about them, the tendency of the film families is not to go by the public word.

However, when tragedy strikes, the catharsis is unstoppable and the private and the public worlds turn topsy-turvy, as these must have for Salman Khan. The irony in his tragic run is that Salman does not have a Chandramukhi to turn to, after being rejected by Paro. Nobody does. That is what makes life so much more difficult than art.