• PAGE ONE
• INDEX
• HOME

Idol worship

C. V. Aravind

IT HAS become the habit of Indians to raise those we fancy to demi-god status and pay obeisance from a distance. No one stops to think reasonably before undertaking this exercise. Nine times out of ten the idol we worship has feet of clay. The irony is t hat the adoration continues unabated even after this embarrassing fact has been discovered.

Erecting statues to the living, building temples for the undeserving, worshipping the ground trodden by the demi-gods and turning a Nelson's eye to their shenanigans are symptoms of a grave disease gripping our populace. The disease can be cured in a jif fy, but given the herd mentality, these measures are not considered.

A recent news report informs us that the Bengalis have decided to construct a temple for Mr Amitabh Bachchan. A 12-foot idol of the superstar will grace the sanctum sanctorum of the temple. ``He is our God, our guru, who has touched the lives of millions ,'' gushes an admirer. And what do we do with our Gods? We house them in temples, perform archanas and sing them bhajans . So Mr Bachchan, a wax model of whom is being housed in Madame Tussaud of London, will soon be deified by the Bengalis.

If this news comes as a bolt from the blue to us laymen, it has also stumped Mr Bachchan. He has shrugged it off. But do we need to turn Mr Bachchan into a God? He is a great actor who has never failed to provide entertainment value in his movies, old an d new. If that was the criterion, we should have had temples for Mr Dilip Kumar and Mr Rajesh Khanna too. Mr Bachchan should have requested his fans to desist from turning him, a mere mortal, into a God, but he does not seem keen to displease his fans. T he deifying of actors, a craze in the South, seems to have spread to Bengal, and from there who knows where else.

As long as they lived, M. G. Ramachandran and N. T. Rama Rao were revered as Gods. After their death, their ardent admirers have added them to the pantheon of the Gods and it is a common to see their photographs nestling close to those of the Gods in man y a puja room. But though Mr Bachchan might be a better actor than the two celluloid giants, he is hardly a patch on them when it comes to munificence or genuine emotional contact with the masses. For all the bhai-bhai he displays on the TV show Kaun Ban ega Crorepati?, Mr Bachchan is still the stuff of ivory towers. Should we worship Mr Amitabh Bachchan? Even he would answer this question in the negative.