By: B. K. Vijay
Many people come to me to seek advice on building their career and I have written many articles on how to prepare for white collar jobs. One thing I want to tell our young graduates and budding professionals bluntly is “get out of your cinema logic to succeed in your career”.
Heights of movie craze
If I were in any other place except for South India, I would not have come up with this article. We have reached the peaks of movie craze.
Here are some common attitudes many of us think is normal.
- Every week one movie
- New movie – First day, first show – No matter what the price is and how hard it is to get tickets (Will buy in black, blue, yellow, anything is fine)
- Life is all about movies – Home, office, mobile, cab; ring tones, caller tunes, profile pictures, TV programs, news, discussions with friends – everywhere cinema
- You know what, some use movie dialogues as caller tunes!
- Movie stars are literally idolized – wallpapers to dressing, accent to walking
- Full filmi gyan
- Ask about any movie, will tell everything from director to cameraman, producer to lyricist
- Full knowledge of actors’ personal life – birthdays, breakups, affairs, entire family tree of popular movie stars
I did not mention all the things – for that I may need to write another article. When you put these things on paper, they look funny but they are all facts. My heart starts bleeding every time I see movie buffs, otherwise very bright and talented spoiling their careers by following senseless movies and their logic. Nothing wrong in watching movies, but being crazy about them and giving them more importance than they deserves is stupidity.
Actors are just entertainers
All these movie stars are just entertainers and are paid for entertaining the public. If you really see, actors are like snake charmers, they entertain people for their livelihood. Putting a question forward, can we make a snake charmer the Sarpanch of our village because he is entertaining us? No. then why we are treating entertainers (actors) as real heroes, Gods/Goddesses and giving our most time to them?
An actor acts in a movie, takes money and gets going. If a person acts like Lord Rama for 3 hours, will he become Lord Rama? Of course not. We need to understand that they are just reel performers, they are not real performers.
Movies are made to appeal to the masses
I find all Tollywood movies predictable and similar to each other – cute heroine, handsome hero, some comedy (hero sadistically makes fun of comedian), a villain chasing the hero and heroine, one item song, and then finally there is some bloodshed and the hero turns out to be the winner. Uhhhhhhhhhh! (I am sure most of you will agree to this).
And there are some special effects – hero fighting ten goons and throwing them in air like rubber balls, even after hit with 8-10 bullets the hero is alive, can command a chair to move, villain and his men coming in tens of Scorpios – all doors opening; please don’t ask me you check for yourself.
There is neither substance nor logic in such movies. They will have all the elements that will appeal to all kinds of masses – from rag pickers to rickshaw-pullers and masons to mechanics. Unless these groups of masses watch the movie, it can’t be a super hit.
People from the film industry are very clear that they are making these movies for masses. They know that a movie can only be a hit only if masses watch it. They can make crores by appealing to lakhs of masses who watch in Rs. 10/ticket, not by targeting a few hundreds of educated people – even if each ticket is sold for Rs.500. So when the movie is made for the masses, what can you expect?
Success does not depend on popularity
Success is often linked with popularity in the film industry. The more the hero/heroine is popular the more they are considered successful. But in real life, success and popularity are not interconnected.
Here are some real life examples, Infosys Narayana Murthy and Warren Buffet are successful people, but not popular. Similarly, Vijay Mallya is popular, but not successful. Only in film industry, people link success and popularity. Getting carried away by this logic, ‘the more popular you are, the more successful you will be’, is not a good idea and such kind of thinking will not help you succeed in your career.
Have independent thinking mindset
Idolizing movie stars is immaturity. Many of our people are not able to differentiate between admiring and idolizing. You can admire the person’s acting skills but it’s foolish to idolize some entertainer.
All actors including comedians have independent personality. Why don’t you have your own personality, why do you follow them? A movie star does not want to be someone’s fan. He wants to be an actor, a performer. Why do you want to be a fan?
The movie thing got so ingrained in our DNA that anybody talking like me looks abnormal. But remember one thing, even if a million people follow a logic that is not sensible, it will lead to failure.
Finally, movie stars are just people like you and me. Though they may look handsome, stunning and admirable, packaged up very nicely, they have the same fears and joys, successes and challenges, ups and downs, as the rest of us. We can appreciate them when they entertain us, for that is their job, and then we should get on with our own lives. This is the reality.