The Dark Side of the Moon

The Dark Side of the Moon: Vikram Bhatt on the girl that is Kangana Ranaut

As the Karan Johar and Kangana Ranaut fight escalates, Vikram Bhatt decodes the filmmaker that Karan is and the woman that Kangana is.

I am not someone who watches a lot of television and hence Koffee with Karan is a show I don't follow. I did hear some excited whispers of the young girls in my office about some exchange of words between Karan Johar and Kangana Ranaut on the show but I did not think much of it.

A day later, I saw some posts on Facebook put up there by credible film names, on how Karan was far from a misogynist and never indulged in nepotism. I still did not connect the dots.

It was only the next morning when I read Kangana's interview or perhaps a statement might be a better way to put it, in a city daily - did I understand the crux of the matter. Like every controversy between two people, it matters most to the people who are embroiled in it and for the rest, it's forgotten soon after it has been read. And so it was with me.

Yet as the day went by some thoughts did emerge and then came a deeper understanding, an understanding of not really the conflict at hand, but of life under the arc lights or just life in general, for that matter.

It would be fair to state at the very onset that I don't see anything wrong with Karan Johar or his way of working. He is, after all, a businessman and he has the right to choose with whom he wants to work and in whom he wants to invest his millions. It would be unfair to castigate him for his creative and entrepreneurial choices. I wouldn't call it nepotism. And misogyny is too sweeping an accusation to let it hang out there as a generalization. Ergo, I shall desist going there. This is not about Karan Johar, simply put.

What is it about then? Well, it is about a scant seen attribute in show business and that attribute is called courage.

When I saw Kangana Ranaut for the first time in a film by the name of Gangster, I was awed by her performance. She stood tall with all her vulnerability. Years later, she still stands tall in all her vulnerability.

I have been around here for twenty-five years as a director and ten years before that as an assistant. In all these thirty-five years I have seen most of us become slaves to our needs and don't even realize when we become that. We want to be successful and we want those hits and we want to be famous and we want to be in that place called the hall of fame and then our wants very stealthily have us where they want us; subservient.

Our wants in time become people, people who hold the key to our desires. Producers, financiers, big actors and directors, who have the power to make our dreams come true and we become powerless in front of them. We do not want to displease them, lest they take our dreams away from us.

What we don't understand is that no one really has any power, we are just powerless because we have given our wants and needs too much power over us. If our needs should change we would not care about these key holders of our dreams. Should I not want to be a part of this place then what power would financiers, producers and actors have over me? People don't have power; our wants give them that power. Why blame the people and not our wants?

Kangana Ranaut has the courage to want and not be subservient and that is something I do not see often. I did see that in Mahesh Bhatt when he woke up one morning and said goodbye to his directorial career. That was courageous. So is this lady. She has a media war with an A-lister and close on the heels of that, this one with Karan.

People would think her as a propensity for committing professional hara-kiri. I would defer. In a place where everyone is careful not to step on toes for what it might do to their golden futures here is a girl who says, "Screw it". I have no idea if Kangana is right or wrong on the stand that she has taken but I am certain that I am looking at a courageous girl. I have no idea how long she will live in the minds of people but I have no doubt that she will be able to live with herself till the day she doesn't.

Here is a girl who will be able to say that there were two roads that diverged in the woods and she chose the one less travelled by.