Bollywood Baatein: Kuch toh sharm karo!

It’s time to open up your hearts and coffers to give to those who need our help. And, if not now, then when?

Regrettably the will to give away wealth at a time when civilization faces extinction seems lamentably low, and also more to do with being in the news than a genuine desire to be useful to a society that has made you a star in the first place.

What we hear is this or that star giving a few lakhs, which is what they spend every month on dog food. But when you hear that the average A-list superstar charges anything from Rs 30 crores to Rs 130 crores, or the B listers get in the range of Rs 10-50 crores, you wonder what they hope to achieve by tossing tidbits at people who are at the end of the tether. For God’s sake, don’t insult the needy by throwing crumbs at them.

Of course, what an individual chooses to give or not give is entirely a personal choice. But how personal is that choice when the amount being given out is made public long before it reaches needy hands?

Sonu Sood, the messiah of the downtrodden and truly the most generous entertainer India has ever produced told about a drunken superstar's midnight call.

"Tu kya kar raha hai? Kyon kar raha hai yeh sab?" the Superstar slurred.

Why spend on helping the needy when you can gift yourself another posh apartment in a high-rise that stands tall in inverse proportion to your moral fabric?

The disturbing news reaching our troubled lives is that public declarations of charity by our entertainers do not add up; that there is a vast chasm between what is promised and what is delivered.

Of course, we are not doubting the integrity of some of the real Bollywood warriors. But the list of the genuine warriors is abysmally short. Where are the film families with generations of wealth accumulated from the love and tax money of the masses? What have they done during this time of unparalleled crisis?

I know of film families whose wealth runs into billions, if not zillions. Aren’t they ashamed of only making the right sympathetic noises on social media and not putting their money where their mouths are? Aren’t they embarrassed asking us to help Covid victims while they sit in their ivory towers, planning their next luxury car, their next holiday in the Maldives, their next, next and next.

Don’t they get it? There may not be a next of anything if we don’t use our surplus wealth to help those who need it the most. It’s time to do the right thing.

Or as Nawzuddin Siddiqui bluntly put it, Kuch toh sharm karo.