It’s Not Arjun Reddy and Kabir Singh It’s Shankar We Should Worry About

Jaggananth  Puri is laughing all  the way to the  bank. His obnoxious deeply offensive  gender-prejudiced and brain-challenged  new film Telugu Ismart Shankar is raking in the dough as  though there’s no tomorrow.

The  film hits  rockbottom  of  the creative  barrel churning out the kind of venomous toxic garbage which one thought Indian cinema  was done  with. But then there  is  always those  Puri ki Puri  sexist  misogynistic type of filmmakers who  stop at nothing to  provide the  proverbial frontbenchers    the cheap thrills that they are  looking for outside their homes.

It comes as  shock to know that this misogynist mess  has a woman(actress Charmee  Kaur) as   co-producer. Ms Kaur  obviously  saw no  offence in women being  pushed around by a hero who has  a chip not only his shoulder  , but also in his head. 

Indeed Ismart Shankar is  the  commercial Telugu cinema’s equivalent of  pornography.Women are treated as  playthings to be enjoyed and abused as and when the lord and master , a.k.a Hero Sahib wishes.And  men in the audience love it when  the hero shouts at  the heroine as  though she is his slave.

 There are  numerous sequences  in this film where  the  heroine is  manhandled and heckled.  Apparently that’s a very manly thing to do in Jagannath Puri’s kingdom of cinematic thrills. But the  one sequence that had meshellshocked is the one where  our hero Shankar(Ram  Potheneni) barges  in  on    a woman and threatens  to  rape her ,calls the  cops on him for sexual harassment.

But by the time  the cops arrive  she has changed her kind. She is in  love with her harasser.Rape is thereby reduced to an easily  negotiable  condition.

So there we  have it  the  full-blown  satire on  the MeToo movement.  Puri knows  the  real truth about women who  shout out  for sexual offences.If he had his way Puri would let women be heckled,  accosted,  harassed and manhandled because that’s what they like.  Or  so  Jagannath Puri believes.

And  going by the  boxoffice collections of Ismart Shankar the moviegoing audiences believes in Puri’s  thesis on gender  dynamics.  Empowering women in our cinema is a far cry when movies don’t even seem  to  respect them.While we’ve been

I tried  getting  in touch with Puri  . He chose not to  respond. The success of his  crass film must have left him  speechless .