It speaks of linearity between the fictional space of a Bollywood film, the leisure of film-going and an orchestrated terror attack that rips apart the stability of our everyday lives. Somewhere in our minds, the public space is now integral with the potential for terror attack, whether the airport, shopping mall, or even the hospital. It is where the normalcy that envelopes our lives has actually been integrated with the potential for a rupturing of that very normalcy, and which gets figured in public culture viz. the mafia film, sensationalized media reportage or reality shows on 24 hour news channels.
It is probably significant that the connection between the Ahmedabad blasts and Ram Gopal Varma’s film were made fairly early in the day. It indicates the same linearity, which perhaps did not exist even a decadeearlier--the linearity of linkage between the fictional and real, the leisure space of Bollywood and the terror on our streets. In today’s age no defence minister can forego that connection; intelligence agencies were among the first to note the connection between the blasts and the recent release. As a society we definitely have changed since a defence minister supposedly discarded a document ostensibly because it was ‘fictional’.
It is an odd nexus. While intelligence agencies have been among the first to grasp the connection between the blasts and the film, a very average film, which has largely gotten bad reviews, will now, it seems, pick up on box-office collections.Contract, now in the headlines, for its most uncanny prefiguring of the Ahmedabad terror strike might even go on to become a reasonable hit. Amidst every kind of speculation over this connection, the connection between the regular and the disruptive thicken in our minds and in the collective psyche. On the one hand we are, more than ever a vigilant and alert society; on the other, also, more than ever, paranoid and on-the-edge. That’s what political instability in amediatised world has driven us to.