The problem is with our perception
There is a lateral thinking riddle that blows my mind. Let me ask you! Here goes… A surgeon was driving down the road and saw that the road was blocked by a huge throng of people. The surgeon stopped the car and got off to see what the crowd had gathered for. On reaching the spot the surgeon saw a young man lying wounded on the road. “Oh my God!” exclaimed the surgeon, “That is my son!” But the surgeon was not the boy’s father. Who then was the surgeon?
Most people get confused and kick themselves when I tell them the answer. The surgeon was the mother! Simple yet clever. The reason is nothing but perception. When we say surgeon, we imagine a man and not a woman. The problem is with our perception and not the situation.
So also with filmdom and its relationships. I overheard people in my office talking about how a had-been actor was seen on Page Three in a ribbon cutting event for some store. The conversation was about how the actor was reduced to doing such events. Oddly enough on the same page was a current actor doing pretty much the same thing! For her the conversation was about how she must have charged a packet for something like that!
Two actors doing the same thing and yet one was a “poor thing” and the other was “raking it in”. Perceptions!
What creates this perception? No points for guessing, it’s success at the box office. If you are successful you are fine and if you are not doing so well then you are doing anything to make the money.
Salman Khan and Aamir Khan can be great friends but if one of them is not doing really well, then he becomes a part of the other’s coterie. I remember an article in the papers sometime ago that said Shahrukh’s fans were now Salman’s friends. Just a way of saying that the coterie had moved allegiance but no one stops to think that they could be “real friends”.
I remember the time that I was just Sushmita Sen’s boyfriend and then Ghulam happened and I was Ghulam’s director. I am reminded of Krishna and Sudama’s story. Friendship can exist between people of different success meters. We can look at it differently.
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