This man now evokes fear across the border
Pakistan once again raised the K word at the UN, only this time, it was a reference to the latest Akshay Kumar flick, Khiladi 786, which has bombed at the box-office not just in India, but neighbouring Pakistan as well, where citizens are yet to recover from the after-effects of the movie.
Pakistan’s ambassador to the UN, Wah Wah Khan, lambasted India for producing Khiladi 786 and enjoined the global community to put pressure on India to dismantle the infrastructure that churns out such abominable flicks relentlessly year after year.
Pakistan has also rejected calls for entering into a composite dialogue with India, saying the only issue it is willing to discuss now is banning of Khiladi 786, pirated CDs of which continue to flood into Pakistan, taking a toll on its civilian population. “As India’s western neighbour, we have suffered the full blow-back of movies like ‘Golmaal’, ‘Son of Sardaar’ and ‘Jab tak hai Jaan’ in silence. But there is a limit to our patience and don’t make us breach our inner lines of control,” warned the Pakistani diplomat.
Heeding the zeitgeist, popular leader and former cricket, Imran Khan termed the fare being churned out of Bollywood a bigger threat to peace and security than even drone strikes. “My #1 priority will be to get India to stop producing such crap and putting Akshay behind bars,” he thundered during a rally in Gujranwala and went on to call Akshay a RAW agent although the Khiladi star had nothing to do with either ‘Agent Vinod’ or ‘Ek Tha Tiger’.
Finding itself on the back-foot, India firmly rejected Pakistan’s calls for reining in non-state actors such as the Khiladi Kumar, saying it is as much a victim of his movies as the rest of the world. “More people in India have suffered through such movies than anywhere else in the world. Unfortunately, our Constition allows people to produce movies, however dumb they may be and our hands are tied in this matter,” rebutted India’s envoy to the UN, Hardeep Singh Puri.
Meanwhile, Akshay Kumar has been conferred the Nanasaheb Phadke Award by the President of India for his yeomen contributions to cinema and the arts by setting impossibly low benchmarks with his movies.
Gratefully accepting the award with a cheesy grin, Akshay said failure tastes bitter and the award would inspire him to make movies even worse than ‘Chandni Chowk to China’ and ‘Khiladi 786’.