Is PK also India's most-discussed film ever?

We Indians say, speak, tell, wonder, ponder, mull, assert, claim, allege, insinuate  - and write - a lot. Little wonder, we have been doing it for a few thousand-odd years, as speaker after speaker has reminded us in the ongoing Indian Science Congress. If someone slipped in, during the said Congress, the assertion that PK, the film, was scripted and made into a motion picture in the Vedic age, I will not dispute it. Heck, I have no idea who Mr Pythogoras was (note to self: must have been a white man, given the word "goras" in the name), what to speak of theorem he propounded, and whether Indians had known that centuries before he propounded whatever it is that he did.

But PK, the film, must have done something that requires so much focus - even from people who would otherwise have no opinion to offer on other serious top-grossers from Bollywood, such as Kick of Salman Khan. Is PK the most-watched film in India? On an average day I would have asked you to check with the usher at Mumbai's Maratha Mandir, the theatre where another crore-club film, DDLJ, ran for years and years (in fact, it ran for so long that it outran the train that had pulled out of the station with Shah Rukh and Kajol, and at the end of the nth screening it could be alleged that people were paid to watch the film instead of paying to watch it.)

If you find that PJ so ridiculously poor as to call it BPL, Sucheta Dalal (@suchetadalal), a very senior journo normally dabbling with serious stories, had something similar to say about PK, the film. "#PK mystery. Were invisible aliens occupying seats? Regal in Mumbai had empty stalls, posh mall in suburbs had 10ppl on christmas! Who paid?" she tweeted.

That's conspiracy theory #1. That the usher at Regal and the hall in the mall might say people do not usually go for films on Christmas, and prefer, instead, to go places where alcohol is bought/can be served, is of course another argument. Conspiracy #2 has been propounded by R Jagannathan, another very senior journo normally dabbling with serious issues. "One point struck me about film pk; pk is internet domain ending for Pakistan just line [like] .in for India", Jagannathan (?@TheJaggi) tweeted.

One is not sure what to make of it, aside from asserting that he either has or has not watched the film Chupke Chupke; either does or does not remember Dharmendra's poker-faced line to Om Prakash ("neechey Srivastav PK aaye hain"); and either was or was not struck by the PK puzzle there. Or, hang on, since internet, which might or might not have been invented by an ancient Indian researcher and developer in Vedic-age India, was not around in the '70s, I should either rephrase or not rephrase that.

Conspiracy #3 came a couple of days ago, when Kanchan Gupta, an equally senior journo normally dabbling with equally serious issues, wrote a column on PK, the film, in Mid Day, the Mumbai tabloid, suitably headlined, "PK was a trap, and the naive stepped into it": "...A friend who is a film buff and far more knowledgeable about Bollywood movies than me, said Aamir Khan and others involved with the making of PK should issue a formal statement thanking the protesters. But for their raucous criticism and loutish activism, the film would not have grabbed so much attention and trade..." Which, of course, contradicts Sucheta Dalal's observation made today - the film either did or did not do real trade and people either did or did not actually go there to watch it - but let inanities be.

Salman Khan and the director of Kick, the film, must be wondering what they should do to kick up such action. And attention. Suddenly, it's "just a film" is no longer a valid argument. 

Disclaimer: I have not watched PK because I have been advised by my Guru that it would not hold my attention long enough for me to not curse myself and itch to step out for a smoke. In which case the very sparing me would not be sparing enough for my self - for wasting a couple of hundred rupees.