Of opportunities and outcomes

Nepotism. Couple of years back, Bollywood was getting beaten black and blue with this word. Especially Karan johar and all those star kids that he had introduced and continuing to do so till date. The death of Sushant singh, by suicide, resulted in a vertical split and every person who otherwise were keeping quiet, suddenly found their voice. Favoritism, nepotism whatever other name you call it, takes you to the door step and possibly open the door as well. But the travel or the journey beyond the first step, is still determined by talent. Agreed that, as compared to someone with no background, there is a definite cushion all the way to hand hold the star kids to success. But despite best efforts, not many of them succeed as well. The inherent talent or the lack of it will eventually come out and beyond a point no amount of gold plating or padding from their supporting angels can help. There are possibly more star kids who fail and fall hard do they!! Of the lot who succeeds, nothing comes out more rosier, for they not just carry the legacy of their parents or siblings, but get to encash on prevailing success as well. In some cases, it could lead to a tale of its own where the parent might not’ve made the cut but their kids being trailblazers. Now finally to the person who launched this post – Alia Bhatt.

I’ve known her as the person who screwed up on a chat show, mixing up the name of incumbent president with ex-cm of her home state, in front of thousands of people. She became meme material for next 2 years and as her mentor would’ve it, even encashed on the negative publicity by making it a video of her own. Her first movie, was nothing but a star kid launch pad of colossal investment, where routine annual sports day in school was made out on the scale of Olympics, every kid on the “school” wore nothing but high end designer costume and the investment that went behind every song picturization could’ve launched a movie in itself!!  It was a no brainer movie and her performance probably reminded people of how star kids lead their lives in real – pampered and spoiled. Slowly she started getting accolades for her performances and even then I was under the impression that, having been from such a filmy background, they could be paid reviews. The first actual movie that I saw of hers was “Dear Zindagi”. She was rocking awesome in that movie and her performance of such a complex character was top notch. It did show lot of promise but was never a big fan of her choice of movies. The next one I saw was  “Humpty sharma ki dulhaniya”, that too quite recently. The only reason why I even saw that one was that, was literally bored to death and wanted to check some dumb comedy movies, having grown tired of all those murder mysteries. The movie didn’t disappoint and was quite dumb, but what was refreshing was the confidence with which Alia held on to her role. There was an effortlessness with which she carried herself that she oozed confidence on screen even on those scenes where she didn’t had dialogue but just have to look at the other person speaking their lines. I saw couple of other movies of her and was genuinely impressed with her skills and I think she has aced her performance with the recent release “Gangubai Kathiawadi”. Her dimples and smile that she puts to major use across her other movies, she has genuinely tried to come out of that image. There are couple of scenes where she smiles in this otherwise sad story, but the way she laughs with a slight rocking of her head or even her smile which displays sadness and not the chirpiness from her other movies, seemed like she has taken real efforts in getting into the skin of this character, that carries the entire runtime on its shoulders. 

Most of successful heroines, tend to pick meaty scripts prior to their marriages that are usually women centric which they wouldn’t have touched with a mile long stick, had it been any other time in their life. May be marriage gives them the confidence to pick such scripts, setting a path for themselves to do more meaningful roles post marriage. All said and done, for an otherwise dull and normal story line, its her performance that stands heads and shoulders above everyone else. I loved the speech that comes towards the end and some sharp one liners thrown around the movie. Definitely one of her mature performances that goes on to show, nepotism or otherwise, this is real talent.