THE SECRET OF A TRUE SUPERSTAR







Today isn’t a Friday… But, this Bollywood movie – ‘Secret Superstar’ was released today, on a Thursday. Because it is Diwali, an auspicious day!

Like so many around me, I, too, wait for an Aamir Khan movie to come…. We all know that his movies come like Comets…. Very few, but very special…. When they come, we all rise up and give them a standing ovation…

This side of Aamir Khan is unlike the quintessential Bollywood… This man does things on his own terms… does things which he completely believes in… invests all his time, energy, money and, above all, his heart and soul… I hadn’t been a great admirer of him before ‘Lagaan’ came. With ‘Lagaan’, I started following his professional career very, very closely… With ‘Tare Zameen Par’, Aamir carved for himself a place too among the rarest of the stars… with ‘3-idiots’, he became a permanent resident in everyone’s hearts… ‘PK’ transported us to another world with laughter and innocence… With ‘Dangal’, he restored our self-belief and ignited our fighting spirit… And, with this movie, ‘Secret Superstar’, he makes us follow our dreams… yes, against any kind of odds, that is!

As there was a day off, my wife and I watched the 9.30 show in the morning. At one time, they used to call it – ‘First-day-first-show’. I became quite nostalgic… When I was in school, back home in Mangalore’… movies used to be released, over there, months after they were released in Mumbai (Bombay)… Newspapers, Radio and grapevine were the only source through which we could collect info about any upcoming movie… The excitement of watching the first-day-fist-show… by bunking school and college and in ‘black’, that too… yes, it was a different high altogether!

Today, the experience of watching the first-day-first-show was nowhere near the experience of our good-old days…

The other day, I asked, in my class, the young ones, “Have you heard of the phrase – ‘Matinee show’?

No, they hadn’t…

“Have you heard of the phrase – ‘Matinee idol’?

No, they hadn’t…

“What about ‘Potboiler’?

“What boiler?”

Pot…boiler!

I was impressed by the movie – ‘Secret Superstar’… Watch it for the way this simple story of a Muslim school-girl, who dreams to become a great singer, is narrated. Aamir Khan’s movies have a soul in them… I have heard him say, often, that he is unapologetically an emotional person, who cries buckets of tears while watching emotional scenes in any movie. That explains why his movies leave us stirred from our core…

Just watch it for the kind of commitment and passion he puts in his craft… for the kind of conviction and confidence he places in his cast – almost all the actors in this movie, except him and Zaira Wasim, are unknown faces… What he manages to do is: tell the story well, from the soul!

To me, that is the take away…

Well, having said that, let me not sign off without saying something about following our dreams and achieving our so-called ‘success’… Let me remind you, here, that our professional success is our external success… all yardsticks and benchmarks are decided by the make-believe world outside… where it is: the bigger the better, the more the merrier… the number of likes, shares, views, hits, headlines, the box-office collections and the critical acclaim, the rave reviews, TV and media appearances… and, yes, the glamorous and glittering ‘awards’…

Somehow, the whole idea of this kind of success doesn’t appeal to me, anymore… It’s like this: to make to heaven, we need to be ‘hell-bent’…

Yes, if we are ‘hell-bent’, we can certainly make it… But, that will be a ‘hell’… not ‘heaven’!

The price that we pay is, often, too high… It is not worth it!

I do not wish to spoil your movie experience by revealing more about the movie… Please go ahead and watch it… It is a movie about following our dreams against all odds… It’s about living in this society with dignity and self-respect … Yes, it is about achieving ‘Success’ in life…

I came home thinking a lot about that ‘internal success’ which, to me, is the secret of a true superstar!


GERALD D’CUNHA

Pic.: Internet



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