There is something that unites today's Bollywood release 'Dunki' with Shankar-Rajinikanth's '2.0' and the Mahesh Babu-starrer 'Maharshi'. They make emotional arguments that are not rooted in reason and logic.
Let's look at 'Dunki'. The film bats for open borders. Like birds, humans should have the freedom to cross borders the way they want. If your neighbour and you want to migrate to the US, Visa formalities and passport rules must be dispensed with. If not, you and your neighbour are entitled to cry hoarse and revel in a victimhood complex. Ideally, your government should enter into a bilateral agreement with the US government to let you and your neighbour travel business class for free. Rajkumar Hirani hasn't made this demand for now but if his dream becomes a reality, Indian political parties will vie with each other to make such poll promises.
'Dunki' says that millions end up as refugees and many thousands die every year trying to illegally cross borders. So, let's do away with visas and all! Every immigrant will be legal then. Wow!
The film makes an uneducated equivalence between economic migrants and those driven by war, famine and genocide. This is nonsense. In 'Dunki', the characters played by SRK, Taapsee Pannu and the three others are hardly poor or famished. They want to migrate out of India to earn more. One of them wants to migrate to London to meet his ex-girlfriend. To say that such individuals are as desperate as those escaping famine shows the idiocy of 'Dunki'. Absolute idiocy. No other way to put it.
In any case, not everything should be reduced to the economic logic. Cultural factors matter as well. Why does SRK's Hardy Singh fly into a rage when a foreigner tries to kiss his girlfriend, played by Taapsee Pannu? Cultural factor. She is ready to receive a flying kiss from her fake groom but not a lip-to-lip kiss. This is why open borders shouldn't exist. Our cultural mores and standards are not the same. Indiscriminate immigration will change the character of societies, leading to social chasms, clashes and worse. Immigrants from some countries are regressive. Imagine such people becoming the citizens of a modern society that gives full rights to homosexuals, for example.
In '2.0', the problem was different. Pseudo-science was peddled by director Shankar's overrated movie that remains one of the biggest commercial hits of all time. When the movie was released in 2017, Bombay Natural History Society's former director said this: “People feel because of cell phone and mobile tower radiation, the number of house sparrows is on a decline. But the feeling is not science. There is no scientific proof between electromagnetic radiation and the absence of sparrows." In a recent article, environmentalist AM Aravind wrote that '2.0' is full of scientifically untenable assertions backed by zero evidence.
In 'Maharshi', Mahesh Babu's character propagates the lie that the number of farmers is going down so perilously low that, soon, there will be no farmers left to grow stable crops for Indians. This is absurd. Actually, there are too many farmers and that's why their incomes haven't grown as much as the incomes of those working in other sectors. Disguised unemployment has been a decades-old problem in our country. 'Maharshi' came out when our godowns maintained by the Food Corporation of India have been overflowing with excess food grains for years.
Films like 'Dunki' and 'Maharshi' invent problems so that emotional manipulation can be used to mint money at the box-office.
