Food for thought piece by PB Mehta.
Starts with the famous French lines and then moves on to Bolly:
Some reactions to Salman Khan’s conviction have elements of a Marie Antoinette moment for India’s ruling classes.
When confronted with the fact that the poor were rioting because they had no bread, Marie Antoinette is alleged to have said, “Why can’t they eat cake?” Strictly speaking, this attribution is incorrect. In his Confessions, Rousseau attributes this howler to another princess. But when discontent rises, as it did during the French Revolution, the distinction of generations matters less than the follies of class.
Faced with the reality that someone was mauled to death while sleeping on the footpath, reactions from some stars have the same quality: the outrage is not over the drunk driving, the sympathy is not for the victims, the concern is not for the rule of law. Rather, what emerges is the stunning “why were they sleeping on the footpath?” The poor are to be held responsible for their own lack of options. They are a nuisance, standing in the way of drunk drivers in fancy cars who think footpaths are racing tracks. It would be easy to write this off as the reaction of a deluded few.
But it is hard to shake off the feeling that this moral obtuseness and lack of social imagination is now so much second nature to India’s ruling classes that there is no longer any shame even in espousing it. The evidence for this is Bollywood itself. Bollywood’s great success, when it was a genuine national institution, and not a cultural manifestation of the secessionist tendencies of India’s privileged, was this. It sublimated all eros into refined poetry. But it also sublimated the desire for justice into a popular art form. Bollywood provided an escape. But it was not escapist. The Bollywood of the early Raj Kapoor, of Sahir Ludhianvi and Shailendra, of the Progressive Writers’ Movement, Guru Dutt and Bimal Roy, the angry young Amitabh Bachchan or even Prakash Mehra and Manmohan Desai drew its resonance from a popular desire for justice, the hope that in movies, if not in real life, the underdog and the marginalised will get some redemption. Or even if they were not redeemed, their presence pricked the conscience of the privileged.
Then to Dalal Street:
Similarly, so much of the schizophrenia over land acquisition stems not from obtuseness over the possible long-term benefits that might necessitate short-term pain. It stems from the raw suspicion that this is not really for the benefit of farmers. There is no surrounding culture of identification or empathy, nothing in elite sensibilities or behaviour that could credibly convince anyone that this progress is really about the future of farmers. There might be objective reasons why giving up land might be a good idea. But those making the case are doing so with such a sense of entitlement to poor people’s property that you wonder. If you want the sociological equivalent to Bollywood’s obtuseness over Salman Khan’s case, just watch the Twitter handles of so many captains of industry, including in leading sectors like pharma: the open contempt for poor farmers will become apparent. Indian capital’s moral obtuseness makes it its own worst enemy.
We often decry politicians for bending over backwards to appear to be pro-poor. They may be hypocrites. They may use pro-poor arguments to underwrite bad policies. But at least they somewhere have to acknowledge a complex reality. If you thought Lutyen’s Delhi was out of touch, just wait till you see Dalal Street and Bollywood. Even more Marie Antionettesque.
Much of D-street owns and funds B-street. So it is but natural to show the disconnect on the big screen as well…
Mostly Economics 
