Going through my old photographs recently, I came across a picture of a Salman Khan poster on the wall of a restaurant in Buenos Aires. Seeing that familiar face thousands of kilometres from home made me smile. For a moment, Buenos Aires felt a little less foreign. The poster also reminded me that I had actually enjoyed the film. I liked Dabangg. I had fun.
If I had had a choice, I would probably have preferred to watch it in a single-screen theatre, surrounded by people laughing loudly, whistling at the hero’s entry and cheering the most outrageous jokes. I like seeing people having a good time, people who, for a few hours, are not discussing what is wrong with the world. The hero wins. The villain loses. The good people survive. The lovers get together. There are tears, but they don’t get the last word. Everybody lives happily ever after.
I did not watch Dabangg looking for a profound statement about society or a finely etched psychological portrait of its characters. I wanted to be entertained, and it did exactly that. Sometimes I don’t want great acting, profound dialogue or a penetrating insight into society. Sometimes I just want a good time. Perhaps that is because there is already enough reality waiting outside the cinema. Switch on the television or look at social media and the world seems permanently on the verge of collapse: floods, droughts, rotting grain, political crises, angry debates, one disaster following another. Even happiness can sometimes feel like something we are expected to justify, as though laughing while the world is suffering is somehow frivolous or selfish.
I don’t want to feel guilty for being happy. I want to sit in a dark theatre and hear other people laugh. I want to cheer when the hero arrives. I want the villain to get his punishment. I want, for three hours, a world in which the good guy wins and nobody asks me to submit a thesis on why I enjoyed it. And this isn’t really about Salman Khan. I would have been just as happy with Shah Rukh Khan or Govinda. Johny Lever, yes. Shakti Kapoor, perhaps not. Mehmood was my favourite comedian as a child. My mother preferred emotional films, while my father liked “Muslim socials” and the kind of dialogue delivery associated with Rajkumar and Dilip Kumar. I remember once asking my mother, “What makes a song good? Are only sad songs considered good?” That was the impression I had formed from listening to the songs my parents liked. She quickly denied it and suggested a few romantic songs she considered good. Listening to some of them today, I suspect my twenty-first-century feminist sensibilities might have a few objections. Some of those songs were romantic; some were really just patriarchy with a good melody.
Not every entertaining film is good. Some are badly made, lazy or simply painful to watch. Critics are entitled to dislike them. Taste matters. Craft matters. Criticism has its place. Sometimes I just want an escape. I want a story in which the bad man is unmistakably bad and gets what is coming to him. I want a hero who doesn’t spend twenty minutes wondering whether he has the moral authority to punch the villain. I want the punch to land, the audience to cheer, and the music and dance to match the mood. I don’t need every character to be in shades of grey. I don’t need every ending to be ambiguous. Sometimes I want an answer. The good guy wins. The villain loses. Everyone goes home happy.
Indian cinema has given us generations of films that understand this simple pleasure, from Padosan, Chupke Chupke and Gol Maal to Andaz Apna Apna, Hera Pheri, Welcome and many more. Some are clever, some chaotic, some gloriously silly. Their greatest achievement may simply be that people still quote their dialogues, remember their characters and laugh at the same jokes decades later. Perhaps that is why the Salman Khan poster stayed with me. In Buenos Aires, I wasn’t thinking about whether Dabangg was a great work of cinema. I was thinking about the simple pleasure of having enjoyed a film, and the unexpected comfort of seeing something familiar in a distant city.
I stood there, looked at that poster and smiled. Entertainment doesn’t always have to change the way we see the world.
