Why Ram Gopal Varma tweeting about Sunny Leone is beyond us

"If only acting talent is a measure for stardom, why wasn't Smita Patil bigger than Srideviji...the thunder thighs made the difference."

"He (Rajinikanth) is a bad looker,doesn't have 6 packs ,short with a disproportionate body n knows just 2 nd half dance movements. Nowhere in world a man who looks like this can be SuperStar. (sic)"

"Amitabh Bachchan, ur expression is so m**d*rc***iously b***nc**d that I challenge so called today's b*h**c**dious actors replicate even 1-%. (sic)"

"Did Lord Ganesha have a paunch in his childhood too or did it develop in the recovery time of the elephant head operation?"

"Megastar SRK becoming ordinary fan,dwarf etc is as big a same blunder as what Kamal Hasan did to lose his stardom to Rajnikant(Salman Khan). (sic)"

"Mamooty should learn acting from his son. He is a junior artiste compared to his son. (sic)"

"I wish all the women in the world give men as much happiness as Sunny Leone gives."

The last statement Ram Gopal Varma made in a tweet brought the entire world angrily flinging those tired adjectives at him for the nth time: Shocking, Vile, Disgusting, Controversial, Sexist, Misogynist, Mad, Psychologically Imbalanced, so on and so forth.

But here is the thing: Ram Gopal Varma does not care. You cannot shame him. You cannot censure him. You cannot censor him, of course. There is nothing you can do except for standing a corner and shaking your fist because he has offended you.

Ram Gopal Varma operates in the fifth dimension. He is beyond our common understanding of good and evil, right and wrong, politically correct and incorrect. It does not mean that he has lost his marbles, clinically. If he did, kudos to his producers who keep investing in his work year after year. Think about this. Some of the top directors in our film industry get blacklisted after they deliver just one mega-flop. And yet here we are. RGV is releasing Sarkar 3 next month and even after countless commercial failures, even after the much-reviled Aag, he has managed to release a film every year. Every year! Sometimes, multiple films in a year in multiple languages.

So, stepping aside from the entire holier-than-thou haranguing over the Sunny Leone tweet, let us admit for a second that there is absolutely no point or reason to write off Ram Gopal Varma as a filmmaker yet.

Now, coming back to the point, Ram Gopal Varma's statements, opinions, tweets and of course, his super-entertaining book Guns and Thighs brings to mind that thing Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about morality. "There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena," Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil.

Ram Gopal Varma, quite surely to the envy of many, is not caged by morality. He does not think twice before shooting off an opinion against anybody, be it Rajinikanth or  Mammooty, Shah Rukh Khan or Amitabh Bachchan, Sridevi or Sunny Leone. He writes in glorious detail about his love for Sridevi's thighs in his book. In the opening page, he dedicates his book to pornstar Tori Black. He writes of his fondness for "sexy women" and gangsters without any inhibition or any control. That is what the man is. Society can go take a hike if it cannot handle him.

What is absurd with people's criticism of Ram Gopal Varma is that the criticism is knee-jerk, shallow and lacking in intellectual depth. It is not adequately proportional to the madness of RGV. People are swayed by the rhetoric RGV uses and never scrutinises why he said what he said. That is because people are afraid to broach certain topics. When you put Rajinikanth or Lord Ganesha on a pedestal, or make Sunny Leone unworthy of respect, beyond any constructive criticism or even analysis, you are no bigger an intellectual or a liberal than RGV.

In fact, you are worse. A blind, pedestrian, intellectually backward pleb.

You can hate RGV as much as you want. It won't make a difference. To him. Or his value in the market of film-making and among actors; hell, Big B is working with him for the 7th time! He hasn't invested in liberal media's championing of certain artists like, say, an Aamir Khan or more recently, Taapsee Pannu has. In this way, he is very much like Kamal Haasan who has off late been splendid on Twitter.

Regarding hate itself, in his book Guns and Thighs, Ram Gopal Varma writes, "When someone is up there and he deserves to be up there, try to learn from what he has achieved. If you think he doesn't deserve it, still try to learn from what he has achieved and add your own capability to it, as it might result in you climbing higher than him. To cut a long story short, I feel it's truly wasteful to expend your energy in hating someone."

Bottomline is: Ram Gopal Varma has successfully made himself #trend. There is now a police complaint against him. So, all the more copy that will be written about RGV. And thus, Sarkar 3 gets footage and media-space. Set to release next month.

RGV: 1. Moral police/outrage army: 0.

(This article first appeared in India Today)

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