Bollywood divas Kareena Kapoor and Kangana Ranaut along with director, Imtiaz Ali, known to intellectually hefty at the best of times, generated some hems and haws at a global summit in Delhi on Friday. At a summit where a politician like Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke his mind so forcefully, the two actresses struck an odd. The discussion went downhill from the word go until at one point Kangana, hoping to salvage the soporific chat with some humour asked the audience if it found the discussion boring. “Yesssss!” came the reply from audience in a sobering chorus.
The ‘Bollywood discussion’ showed the fatal flaw in the scheme of putting celebrities on global platforms to speak on national issues. Last year, Katrina Kaif struggled to sound seriously cerebral with Karan Thapar, who tried to scale down his intellectual faculties for the sake of glamour. Says a VIP present at the summit. “The three of them had just not done their homework on their subject. There was no topic of decision, no agenda, no sense of purpose to their discussion. This was specially surprising coming from Ali who is known to be articulate. At one point, Kareena was asked if she remembered her debut film!” This is not to suggest that Bollywood is intellectually unequipped for discussions on global issues.
Karan Johar, Shah Rukh Khan and Farhan Akhtar have repeatedly done us proud at global summits with their cogent, lucid thoughts and observations on socio-political issues. The divas just need to do their homework better at global summits. Stay tuned to this space for more updates on Bollywood news and gossip!
