Chiru, stop poor me, poor me

Monday, April 6

“I used to work for three shifts. When I was newly married, I was busy shooting films and did not go on a honeymoon. I worked for 45 days at a stretch for a film which Jayaprada was the lead actor.” That’s crusader Chiranjeevi ruing about how he sorely missed his honeymoon.

‘“I am from a very humble background. We had just five acres of land. My father was a police constable.” That’s Chiranjeevi again. Here are some more: “As my grandparents were old, I had to perform all the household duties, living on the vegetable grown in our backyard and prawns available in our pond besides rice. While studying BCom, I had to cycle to a near by town, Narsapur daily to reach my college, covering quite a good distance. I used to eat whatever was left over in the night the next day because I did not want to trouble anybody early morning.”

These statements make one wonder if Chiranjeevi suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder or is it narcissistic personality disorder? The megastar seems to be preoccupied with the thought of himself, constantly brooding over his hardships and the sacrifices he claimed to have made. Often times, he slips into the morass of feeling sorry for himself. Occasional self-pity is not really a problem. Only when it becomes obsessive and recurring does it really become a problem.

So Chiranjeevi could not go on honeymoon? How does it matter now? What has that got to do with samajika nyayam? Social justice is not the politics of me, me and me. It is certainly not, the politics of pity. The high-sounding rhetoric of social justice is just a delusion created by Chiranjeevi . Thirty years after earning crores of rupees in the film industry, the megastar’s honeymoon with Tollywood is over and so he embarked on political honeymoon. But politics is not a bed of roses.

Today, the central challenges staring the nation in the face are elimination of poverty, empowering women and ameliorating the conditions of millions who are migrating to urban areas and eking out a precarious livelihood. The need of the hour is a politics that reconnects individuals with each other, a politics that looks outwards as well as inwards, a politics that is not all about ME.