I have always had a kind of mixed feelings about Karan Johar as a filmmaker.  At this of my life, I am not a willing consumer of mainstream commercial Bollywood movies, so I generally stay away from the kind of films he’s been renowned for.  In all these years, I have only watched a couple at most.  However, it has also never stopped me from trying to find out about what movie he’s going to come out with.  You could say that even though I didn’t like the actual movie too much, I certainly admired the style and the scale of his production.  The beautiful people, the technical finesse, I mean the whole aesthetics of the enterprise.  Even otherwise, I have found him to be an intriguing personality, primarily because of all the baggage he has carried with him regarding his private life and I was always looking for the opportunity to discover more of him as people and not so much as a top tier movie maker.  When I learned that he is coming out with his autobiography, it naturally piqued my curiosity.  But at the same time, I was pretty skeptical as to how honest he would be given that he has become such a big brand and is constantly in the limelight.  Nevertheless, I picked up my copy in a perverse way thinking, “Let’s see how hypocritical he gets”.

    As I finished these 200 odd pages of this book written in collaboration with a well-known entertainment journalist and writer Poonam Saxena, the realization hit me that how wrong I was in my judgment and in my pre-conceived notion of the man.  Reading this memoir has been a revelation for me.  I never expected the author to be so candid and upfront about not only his life in general but also about the hopes, fears, the insecurities, the anxieties and the heartbreak which he has gone through, something we also experience from time to time.  I must say I was pleasantly surprised by the kind of candor and honesty that shines through the book.  Indian celebrities, in general, are not given to baring their real self to the public.  Most of them are cagey and have big egos, especially in the entertainment industry.  So, in that sense, it’s a wonderful departure from the norm that someone like Karan has given us an entry into the most intimate spaces of his life.  He has been as candid and truthful as he possibly could have been considering the media environment in this country.  I know a lot of people would be wondering how he has dealt with the constant conjectures about his sexuality.  Even here, without giving too much away, I would just like to say that he has confronted this head on and comes off with a lot of dignity and pride.  In any case, when someone who is as successful and recognizable as he is, tells you where, when and under what circumstances he lost his virginity, you really know you have forged a bond with that person.

   While reading this book, I could hear the chatty, conversational voice of the author and yet at the same time, you can’t help but notice the inherent honesty and the sense of humor with which he has allowed you into his world.  Once you cross 40, you have lived half of your life and the other half can be contemplation on old age, loneliness, and death.  And in that sense, I could feel where he’s coming from.  One other important takeaway for me is how we as people particularly here in India are quick to judge people with whom we have not spent even one hour of our life, but act as if we have the right to brand and judge anyone we feel like.  I know next time I will look at KJ, I will not let my perception of him from the past color my view of him in the present or in the future.

Even as the world is about to witness a somewhat tetchy but absolutely peaceful transfer of power from Mr. Obama to Mr. Trump in the United States; a poor west African nation of Gambia at this very moment is living the classic definition of a banana Republic.  The incumbent president Mr. Yahya Jammen fairly and squarely lost the general elections held last month, but he has refused to accept the verdict and hand over power to the opposition leader.  As the deadline to relinquish office has come and gone, in a bizarre move he has not only imposed a state of emergency across the country but has also got his loyal members of the legislature to extend his term for further three months!  When the neighboring countries and the international observers like the United Nations warned Mr. Jammen that this state of affairs cannot be allowed to continue and that he must respect the will of the people and allow the incoming president to assume office, he has reacted in the most baffling of manners.  The defeated president has got an airplane up and ready with a full tank on the tarmac and the pilot on standby to flee at short notice taking away all of the loot with which he has enriched himself over the years at the cost of the impoverished people of this unfortunate nation.  It will be interesting to see what happens next.

The important thing to note is that no matter how much Trump gets annoyed with the likes of the New York Times or CNN or Buzzfeed, he cannot do a thing because the media in the United States enjoys protection guaranteed under the Constitution.  In India, the media enjoys no such luxury.  Just try to be uncompromisingly critical of any government in power, be it the Gandhi family in Congress party or prime minister Modi in the BJP, and see the iron hand of the state come down upon you like a ton of bricks.

There has been a sickening regularity about it.  New Year’s Eve, young women just wanting to have a good time at some of the popular watering holes in the cities across India, letting their hair down if you will.  Suddenly, a bunch of men materialize out of some dark shadows and start pawing and groping them with an astounding sense of entitlement.  It doesn’t matter that there are so many otherwise nice people around, but nobody is coming forward to help these women as if paralyzed with some primordial notion of shame, complicit somehow in their own debasement.  I often wonder what sort of sexual frustration raging inside these ruffians that even a hint of skin on the opposite sex can turn them into a depraved animal.  Every time something as gross as this happens, it kind of strikes a terrible blow against every other decent man that I know.  I don’t even want to get into any discussion about what those women were wearing or how they were conducting themselves.  If these men can’t control their libido, it’s their problem and not women’s, who have got every right to dress, party and do whatever they would like to do at any hour of the day or night.  What kind of a beast would try to get physical with anyone without their express consent!  The coercion, the violence, and the ugliness is absolutely nauseating.

   I hope that women in India will not take this as a sign of times to come and cower in fear and make themselves invisible.  I want quite the opposite.  I would dearly like to see more than more women coming out in numbers at all hours of day and night everywhere wearing anything that catches their fancy.  All of you must claim your public place without any fear or apprehension.