When Bollywood meets brain

I always dismissed Bollywood movies as just three hours of song and dance. I don’t blame the millions who like them, what with the gorgeous models in coloured contact lenses and hunky studs with perpetually half-shaven appearances.

My wife, like millions of others around the world, used to tell me off whenever I did a voiceover during her dose of Bollywood, which happens late at night – her only time for such vanities since plunging in as a full-time “home maker” (you know, the occupation that some gender activists regard as “unemployed”).

The kind of arguments we used to have about Bollywood. I tell her the movies are made for those who do not have the capacity to think, and that it is to Indians what football is to Brazil. But her remedy is simple: suspend your brain for three or so hours, and enjoy the show.

A sidenote: Not all Hindi movies are “Bollywood”. But almost all that come to our big screens are. You see, it’s not that difficult to identify what is Bolly and what is not. If it’s studded with the Khans and other fruit-sounding female names, then it is Bollywood. If there is not one song during the whole show, then it is just a Hindi movie.

But last week, I watched a whole Bollywood movie, yes, all two and half hours of it. And how about this, I didn’t have to suspend my brain at all. It was a movie about God and the questions that we have always asked without expecting answers.

I kid you not. This Bollywood movie, complete with song and dance, was philosophical, and at the end, one was seized with a feeling of losing one’s religion, and left questioning long-held convictions as well as a dozen other questions about religion and God.

It was the kind of movie that we hope our equally Bollywood-crazed fans in PAS would watch, at a time when the line between what is divine and what is man-made is blurred by a set of religious elites with their dichotomy of right and wrong.

Watching “PK”, released several months back and starring my ugly twin Aamir Khan, is like reading Betrand Russell and Aldous Huxley, only you don't have to read or even pretend to read their works.

But you ask the same questions at the end, with blasphemous thoughts playing in you, about God, His existence, religion – indeed about whatever you have since time immemorial considered as the truth.

The movie is about an alien who landed on earth to research life here. Cut to the chase, he begins to question religion and God, something alien to him back on his planet. He asks silly questions only because they cannot be given smart answers, and his ignorance about human customs means he asked questions that would have never been asked.

The process of challenging one’s convictions is important and should not be denied. Kids do that all the time, asking us what God looks like, and who created God. Without any convincing answers, they soon grow out of this, and eventually they take for granted the religion of their parents, following its rituals, do’s and don’ts, and obeying the men who act as guardians of that religion. Many end up worshipping not God, but the men who invoke God’s name, who play the role of God – a scenario which is all too familiar in our current context.

Questioning one’s religious conviction is not frowned upon in Islamic religious tradition, unlike what we have been led to believe by our salaried defenders of the faith who are seated on cushy sofas in the polished halls of Putrajaya.

One of Islam’s most traditional and conservative jurists, the 12th century Imam Ghazali, also asked such questions, going through a personal crisis when he could no longer ignore the fact that the intellectual path of knowledge was not enough to get him to what is regarded as the Truth.

He became a sceptic, not unlike Descartes and Kant. He questioned Muslim scholars of his time, exposed their wrongdoings and saw the rituals of Islam in a completely new light.

So deep was this spiritual unrest that he was said to have lost his appetite and could not concentrate during his lectures. But he came out of it through reason, and gave the world the voluminous "Ihya Ulumuddin", or the "Revival of Religious Sciences", which for centuries have fascinated philosophers in both the East and West.

Compared with Ghazali, the scholars we have today are mere compilers and academics who parrot facts and arguments, and the result is what we have today among the Muslim ummah: a set of priests whose actions have painted Islam as a dead religion, instead of a living religion that is relevant for all times.

At the bottom of this priesthood with their superficial understanding of God are stand-up comedians with lively speeches, with generous quotes of Quranic verses and obscure sayings attributed to the Prophet. This religious infotainment seems to be the new dope for the masses, so that they stop asking questions.

Our television channels are flooded with religious lectures and speeches. So much of it is tailored to leave us in stitches while at the same time telling us we are still on the right path.

Yet, the truth is, none of these programmes made me think as much as I did after watching the two-and-half hours of Bollywood fun that is “PK”, with its songs and dance, half-shaven studs and coloured contact lenses. – May 16, 2015.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insider.