Toofan | 2021 | Movie Review

Year of release—2021

Director— Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra

Producer— Ritesh Sidhwani, Farhan Akhtar, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra

Lead Actors—Farhan Akhtar, Paresh Rawal, Mrunal Thakur, Hussain Dalal

In a nutshell, Farhan Akhtar’s ‘Toofan’ promotes the narrative that any father trying to protect his daughter from Love-Jihad is a Hindu bigot who shouldn’t be taken seriously by couples in “true love”.

Of course, Censor board chief Prasoon Joshi wasted no time in approving this film that projects the Hindu in a bad light. He was equally quick in rejecting ‘The Conversion’ movie, which was closer to depicting real-life Love-Jihad cases than ‘Toofan’.

Akhtar claims to be an atheist and a communist. In Bollywood, people with this ideological combo need not believe in any religion or supreme deity, but they must vehemently attack rituals, beliefs and customs dear to Hindus while pretending to be “communists promoting social reforms”. Akhtar will never muster the courage to attack any Abrahamic faith. If this ideology isn’t pure hypocrisy, then what is it?

 

This movie also includes BJP MP Paresh Rawal, who has made a career out of blatantly promoting Hinduphobia and lopsided secularism. Even in this film, he plays a devout Hindu, who hates the fact that his daughter Ananya (Mrunal Thakur), a practicing doctor at a respectable hospital wants to live-in with a extortionist in Dongri who beats up shopkeepers for money. The film preaches that the father is wrong in opposing such a match made in heaven. Hindu fathers don’t get angry because of a sense of protection and concern for well-being of their daughters. They get angry because their daughters are not bigots like them.

Among Bollywood’s long-running agenda are – devout Hindus are scheming villains in every decade. And Hindu women are unhappy in their parental home till they find true love that encourages them to disown their families to walk away with that “worthy man”. 

It is noteworthy that Bollywood often behaves like the Mumbai campus of Lahore film industry. Check out these two tweets by Gems of Bollywood comparing narratives in films from Urduwood and Lollywood.

And this…

Can you try to reimagine these scenes happening in a non-Hindu household? For example, imagine an Bollywood scene where an open-minded Muslim woman shuns her father’s bigotry and walks away to live-in with her Hindu lover. Of course, you can’t.

The movie plot, after promoting Love Jihad in the first half, turns into an insufferable and wannabe Rocky rip-off in the second half. This Toofan is nothing but annoying Urduwood dust blown in the eyes. 

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