Editor,
It is true that there are some good Bollywood films. But many Hindi films try to captivate movie audiences by violence. They highlight violence as a panacea for getting justice and even love.
When a victim targets a villain for his misfortune instead of targetting the system, he gets a clap from both male and female audiences. In many popular movies, courtship begins with eve-teasing and that helps those movies get box office success because many men and women are still comfortable with regressive gender models. The addiction to machismo is primitive and gender neutral.
These movies solely depend on this addiction. By pampering machismo, these movies have been doing a great harm to democratic culture where the people are expected to enjoy political power through a ballot, political dissent and peaceful agitation. These movies want to make people believe that primitive, regressive, jungle-raj dictatorship, which is based on the principle that might is right, is a simple solution to their problems.
Sujit De,
Sodepur, Kolkata