Close on the heels of her ad for the Swachh Bharat campaign, Kangana Ranaut appears in this video titled “Love Your Country”, specially released for Independence Day.
Sung by Siddhart Sharma, Piyush Wasnik, and Yash Chauhan, the song has Kangana waking up to depressing headlines about “Corruption”, “Dowry”, “Crime”, “Female Infanticide”, “Rape” and so on, that are hounding the nation. She’s frustrated by all the bad news and decides that the solution for all these problems is to say “yes to my country” and “win for my country”.
A giant ‘EH?!’ pretty much sums up our reaction to this. How exactly is all this selfie-taking, flag waving and saluting supposed to help resolve anything?
The video has a young boy looking up at a Sukhoi with ambition and pride in his eyes and a bunch of older boys beating drums energetically. What are the girls and the women doing? Saluting sweetly all through.
Yes, there’s a token shot of three girls, in what appears to be a school fancy dress competition, wearing the uniforms of the defence forces but that’s all. They’re just saluting too. It’s not a coincidence that Kangana lip-syncs to a male voice in the video, which does not feature any female voices.
The rest of the song has people holding signboards that say “Army” (followed by Go! Win) “Vande Mataram”, “Love Your Country”, “Navy” etc. A bored looking Kangana holds up a “Do you vote?” board, and a flower-seller responds with a “Yes” board. Kangana looks vaguely amused by this.
How is any of this fervour about the country’s defence forces supposed to stop Dowry, Rape etc? How will just voting? Is that all we’re required to do?
Sure, this tacky video is under three minutes long (and thank god for that) but its surface level ‘analysis’ of what patriotism means is sadly and dangerously close to some of the egregious ‘nationalistic’ chest-beating that passes off as ‘love your country’ these days.
Perhaps Kangana should have held up a 'Pass' signboard for this one.