I wonder if so much glaring media attention and vociferous celebrity solidarity this young man, Aryan Khan has got in the last few weeks would’ve similarly attracted as much TRP if it had been any other ordinary average Indian boy caught loitering on the wrong side of law in a suspected drug scandal.
I suspect the ruling establishment is not really making so much of a statement with all this media hullabaloo about either religion, community or youth … I think the real intention is to send out a message against the excesses of the VIP/Bollywood/ High & Mighty culture of entitlement in this country.
I for one know when the common man’s kid gets pulled up by the law in this country, the law-enforcement and justice system invariably give him rough treatment … so roughly as though he were already convicted … No one then, not civil-rights activists, Bollywood divas or press-barons or Shashi Tharoors of society ever rush to his defence crying foul that “But Oh! The process is being turned into the punishment”!
So, when the “process” deals the average man’s delinquent kid with such roughness, why should it be demanded by NCP/Shiv Sena and the ShashiTharoors and Shobha Des of this country that a Bollywood (“filthy rich” and politically well-connected) celebrity’s son (who incidentally, in this case, only happens to be a member of a certain religious community… and quite beside the point really) must deserve to be treated with kid-gloves, almost parental lenience for an errant juvenile and liberal doses of empathetic mollycoddling?
This GIF, I reckon, probably best answers my question :
Sudarshan Madabushi