From the Web (FTW) #14: We are too thin-skinned to accept anything but deification of our leaders

Shekhar Gupta in The Print:

An honest, truthful biopic on Ambedkar, Shivaji, M. Karunanidhi, Balasaheb Thackeray, Rani of Jhansi, Kanshi Ram, Bhindranwale, just about anybody, is impossible. This runs across the subcontinent, the reason why some of our most important public figures have had defining biographies written by foreigners. Jinnah and Bhutto by University of California Professor Stanley Wolpert, for example. Even the film Gandhi was made by a foreigner. When Richard Attenborough once told Nehru in 1963 that he intended to do a Gandhi biopic, the advice he got was, don’t deify him, and show him as he was, warts and all. Will this pass today?

Forget politics. Our sporting biographies and biopics are ghost-written, co-produced by the stars themselves. Movies on our military history, famous battles, from Border to Uri and multiple nonsensical ones on Kargil, wallow in the same malaise. Not for us Indians a Clint Eastwood who’d do a Flags of our Fathers and then a sequel to look at the heroism from the Japanese side with Letters from Iwo Jima. In what passes for an Indian war film, the Pakistanis are idiots, cowardly, comical and very Islamic, flowing beards and all. Remember Border? Let’s see how Farhan Akhtar portrays the Chinese. We are so sensitive, we even took umbrage at that one reference from Bhagavad Gita in a bedroom conversation in Oppenheimer.