Google today released their definitive ranking of India's most searched movie stars in the last decade. The winners?
*Drum roll*
Sunny Leone topped the women and Salman Khan topped the men's list.
Yayyyyy?
Nayy!
Salman Khan and Sunny Leone being top Google searches doesn't really say great things about us Indians. Well it isn't as bad as XVideos being the no. 26 on our top searches.
Bhai isn't that cool
The rise of Salman Khan from everyone's lovable, mischievous younger brother to a dude who makes the SAME DAMN MOVIE every time and is leading the female disrespect index among his Bollywood lackeys has essentially wrecked the Hindi film industry.
Earlier, dudes were making a couple of movies a year, mostly boring, but at least kinda different. Shah Rukh Khan is a great movie star and a terrible actor, but his IMDB from 2009 to 2012 went like this:
Billu
My Name is Khan
Ra.One
Don 2
Jab Tak Hai Jaan
That's at least variety!
Movies Salman did after the unexpected success of Wanted and his new found Bhai'ism?
Salman
Salman
Salman
Salman
The filmography of every major movie star except Ranbir Kapoor (and Ranveer Singh to a certain degree) from 2012 went: Salman Salman Salman Salman.
This is personified by the glorious bandwagoner that is Akshay Kumar (He rode the action, romance and comedy waves previously). He now makes better Salman movies than Salman.
Point is, Salman is not being searched for being a good film actor. He is being searched for his Bhaigiri (Check Mumbai roads, Chinkara population and all women), his bracelet, his one dance move and his girlfriends.
Googling Bhai. |
Salman stopped being "Bhai" when he became just Salman, and this post-Bhai world is a dark place full of next level internet voyeurism.
This isn't the development aspirational India that was promised in acche din. (Yes bringing Modi in everything is cool in a post-Bhai world).
Sunny Leone Ji
Women want to be her and men want to be with her. It's boring but it's true.
In a post-sanskari world (Alok Nath, 2014 Elections), Sunny Leone's rise into the collective Indian consciousness is basically a signboard saying, "We are a sexually f*****" nation.
Sunny is a professional who is doing work and making money and it's cool. But she makes bad movies and is not really a charismatic film star.
She definitely isn't being searched for her legit work for cancer research (Seriously, cheggit).
India is a country where Deepika Padukone, Priyanka Chopra, Anushka Sharma among others are making feminism mainstream. But it's also the country of the uneducated, of the culturally deprived, of the Bhais. These women and their daily lives are so uninteresting (seriously, no) in a world where Sunny Leone lives on beaches (HER EVERY MOVIE) and comes with a funky past (do not insert Bhupendra Chowbay creepy smiling face).
The point is, Google is smart and we are not and we definitely won't get smarter if we keep Googling "Salman Bhai court case" or "Sunny Leone hot pix".
These are scary, post-bhai, pre-Trump, pre-Tiger Shroff is the next Salman times, tread carefully.