Let me start with the clarification that I don't know Katrina Kaif personally at all. Never met her, never laid my eyes upon her beautiful personhood, don't know a thing about her personally. I know Katrina like the audience knows Katrina Kaif—the glittering star whose affairs we read about in tabloids and whose item numbers we dance to when we are drunk at weddings. And I've seen her gyrations improve drastically as she settled down and made Bollywood her karm-bhoomi.
I tuned into the uproar about her "honoured with the Smita Patil Memorial Award" (quoting from a news paper report) late, because I was busy dealing with a feline-related domestic crisis. Almost twenty four hours after the announcement, I saw a few Twitter mentions that tagged me and a few other actresses (my contemporaries) asking in varying degrees of rage and sarcasm why Katrina got the award when all of us were still alive and around? I shan't lie—I was rather flattered. Compliments do that, they lull us into such a pleasant feeling, that we sometimes miss all the hullabaloo and uproar in savoring the sweet words. Then I began to read more on this debate and was struck by the kind of rage and angst that this Katrina-gets-Smita-Patil-Award episode generated. I began to wonder why, and began to have that which I have increasingly less of these days (because all intellectual powers are deployed in heeling up and making 'appearances')—critical questioning thoughts. I began to ask myself, what is all this rage about?
I started with a fact check. The said award—the Smita Patil Memorial Award—is conferred by an entity known as the Priyadarshni Academy. In
their own words, here is who they are:
"The Priyadarshni Academy, a prominent Socio-Cultural-Educational organization of Mumbai, has completed 19 years of public service. It is a Voluntary Organization and dedicated to the promotion of welfare of the humanity.
Source:http://www.huffingtonpost.in/swara-bhaskar/in-defence-of-katrina-kaif/
