MSG is like any Salman Khan film, that's Bollywood for you

A masala flick about a larger-than-life messiah protecting humanity is nothing new to Bollywood fans. Isn’t it all in a day’s work for Salman Khan or Akshay Kumar? MSG: Messenger Of God, pitching Saint Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Ji Insan as a miracle man who cures cancer as neatly as he pummels desh ke dushman, would seem in sync with a cinema culture where Sunny Deol uprooting a handpump continues to remain one of the greatest testimonies to patriotism.

The difference, you would argue, is that MSG is about a real person unlike Sunny’s handpump-buster avatar in Gadar: Ek Prem Katha. It is being hawked as a biopic of the Dera Sacha Sauda chief. The awful truth, many insist, is the film aims at working as propaganda for Baba Ram Rahim.

On awful truths then, here is an unwritten cinematic maxim. Biopics are supposed to lie. They are meant to work as filtered vision of lives less ordinary that sieve reality and elevate the persons highlighted to demigod status.

That the entire MSG madness should happen around this time of the year is ironic. It is after all the global audience’s season of on-screen biographies, as the Oscar months always are. Incidentally, familiar grudges over inaccuracy have greeted several big nominees such as The Imitation Game, American Sniper, The Theory Of Everything, Selma and Foxcatcher. All but the last mentioned are vying for Best Film while Foxcatcher sees Steve Carell being counted among favourites in the Best Actor category.

Back home, MSG has been the film that has made most noise this year so far. Baba Ram Rahim’s self-starring, self-co directed, self-scripted, self-music composed and self-co photographed effort has been subject of protests over the protagonist godman’s alleged depiction of himself as God.

There could have been two ways to react to MSG. Get vocal or get violent. The first is what we have seen in the case of the inaccurate Oscar biggies that have manipulated life stories for glory. It has involved writing, blogging, tweeting, or hitting sundry social media spots and television channels to put across protesting opinions. It works without getting hyesterical about cinema as a form of pop culture that influences as well as entertains.

We, in India, however love to be excessively emotional about everything, more so when it entails an issue riding the god factor. Violence becomes a natural outcome, as it happened with MSG. Even as protesters took to the streets, the film’s newsmaking jaunts included attracting a ban and the melodramatic overhaul of the entire censor board — the last mentioned bound to go down in the history of Indian cinema as one of its most ludicrous episodes.

Such antics, these people fail to realise, have only worked for Baba Ram Rahim and his film. MSG has emerged the most talked about film of the season. If anything, a film that would have hardly made an impact beyond Baba’s (substantially large) devotee base is now the subject of pan-Indian curiosity. A lot more people beyond Baba’s worshippers now want to watch it.

There is a name for that sort of a miracle. They call it clever marketing.