Why Nepotism in Bollywood will never stop until we chose quality content

The year 2020 has been a year of disaster with so many bad news pouring in. The unfortunate death of the Bollywood hero Sushant Singh Rajput is definitely one of the worst among them. The sad demise of such an amazing talent and a young life has left everyone shattered and since then people have been taking a dig on Nepotism in Bollywood. But is it just the film industry that is to be blamed?

 

The unfortunate death of Sushant Singh Rajput

Sushant Singh Rajput was not just another actor in Bollywood but also considered one of the finest alongsides Ayushmann Khurrana and Rajkummar Rao, who without any Godfather started in Bollywood and have got a name with their great acting skills. He was found hanging himself in his apartment and is believed to have done suicide because of depression.

Not only that Sushant Singh Rajput was a fine actor, but he was among the very few Bollywood actors who excelled in academics and a rank holder in All India Engineering exam. Also a keen enthusiast on Space and Programming, a humble person, he was a gem and we lost a great personality.

 

Is Sushant Singh Rajput the only victim of Bollywood’s mercilessness?

The depression that is caused by Bollywood’s tremendous “cut-throat” competition and unfairness has made many stars its victim.

Parveen Babi was one of the best actresses of her time and had given many hit films with the leading co-stars. She became mentally fragile and was addicted to alcoholism and it is believed that the cause of her death was paranoid schizophrenia, a disease which causes delusions and hallucinations. She was living alone in her apartment and her body was found days after her passing away.

Another unfortunate death was of Divya Bharti a young talent in Bollywood who got a name for herself at a very young age. She fell from her apartment in fifth floor and died. Till this death, the cause is still unknown, speculations included accident, suicide and even murder.

The shocking and unfortunate demise of the above two actors are not the only ones in the list, and we just hope that more are no added in the future.

 

Nepotism in Bollywood

After the shocking death of Sushant Singh Rajput, the netizens have been bashing Karan Johar and the star kids who were given entry to Bollywood not based on their talents, but rather because of their family being in the industry and pushing their family to be in the same field. Nepotism is not a new thing that is happening in Bollywood; whenever there is a powerful family or group ruling the film industry for a long time, they tend to bring in their families, be it Kapoors or Khans.

Although Nepotism is the not the problem in Bollywood, but it’s a crime when a young and promising talent is deliberately blocked from success in the industry just because he is an “outsider” and the dominant group doesn’t want him to get to the top. When such an actor knows that he is pro-actively pushed down and not given the position he deserves, anyone would get depressed. Imagine you work hard the whole year and your colleague takes away all the credit just because he is your supervisor’s favourite!

 

Are Favouritism and Nepotism different?

To understand the difference, let us go through their definition.

Nepotism is the practice of favouring friends or relatives by those who have power or influence, especially by giving those jobs.

Favouritism is the practice of giving unfair preferential treatment to one person or group at the expense of another.

So, it is clear from both the definitions that both of them are very much linked to each other. Any office goers will relate this to their lives wherein they have experienced the same treatment. You might have worked hard in a project the whole year, but promotion has been given to another undeserving employee who is the favourite guy of your supervisor. It affects a lot in that employee mentally and not only loses the motivation to work, but also suffers from depression and anxiety.

 

Nepotism in Bollywood

Nepotism is not a new thing in film industry and it’s not just Bollywood that is affected by it, almost any film industry (at least in India) is part of this culture. If you are son or daughter of an actor who has been part of the film industry, you will easily get into a big budget film and will be given a grand entry irrespective of your acting skills. But if you are an “outsider” with no “godfather” in the industry, you have to do all the struggle and prove yourself in each and every films you act.

Of course there are exceptions, two of the biggest actors ruling Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and Akshay Kumar but there are just a few “lucky” ones to make their mark, on the other hand after the tragedy of Sushant Singh Rajput, many established actors have opened up about their experiences of how they were sidelined just because they were not part of a particular group.

So what is this groupism all about? There are some powerful groups in the film industry who influence everything happening. If somehow you are not part of that group and somehow they are not happy, you will keep losing contracts and your success graph will go down resulting into becoming irrelevant in Bollywood in no time.

That is what happened to Sushant Singh Rajput wherein he lost so many contracts that he signed which ultimately was the reason of his depression, probably he dared to speak against those influential group members.

 

Why Nepotism has been in the past and will be there in the future?

The directors and producers has been keeping on this practice of nepotism in the film industry, but aren’t we not responsible as well? Yes, it’s true that they take such star kids as actors, but ultimately who watches those films in the theatre? It’s us, the audience!

Films like Student of the Year 2 earns almost 100 crores while Manjhi earned not even 20 crores. So who are responsible for this? Unless we go for movies that have quality content, we can’t blame the film makers for their partiality. They make better promotion for those movies and we go to watch them, and feel the magic of seeing how the actors live the life of a rich guy or girl, how they change fancy dresses every hour, how they get down from the expensive cars. For middle class, it’s like an illusion and for those 3 hours they just want to imagine the dreams of their lives on the screen from the perspective of the actors.

Once we stop going to watch movies that really have some quality content and support actors based on their acting skills instead of watching the fancy world that these film makers create, we can’t change the ill practice that is going on in the industry for years.

 

Conclusion:

It is not that all the star kids are bad at acting, Hrithik Roshan and Ranbir Kapoor are perfect examples of that. They have proved with their acting and related skills that they deserve a place in the industry. We have to decide whose films are worth watching for and whose are just a waste of money and time. Once this happens, film makers will have to sign stars based on the acting skills and not just based on family names, and give us films with quality story line.

What is your take on this issue?