Two Much With Kajol and Twinkle

One of the strange symptoms of our current climate is an inability to distinguish between ironic and unironic love. When I ask friends who have paid for and partaken in Himesh Reshammiya’s Cap Mania concert, if they are enjoying the music or the performance of a collective exercise in irony, the answers confuse me, because the distinction seems hard to make. The question of what to do with celebrities of irony is itching, because they are people who become known for their upfront, unapologetic silliness. We enjoy their audacity. We cringe at the expression of it. Why do we love Rakhi Sawant? Urvashi Rautela? What primal instinct for trash do they accomplish? Perhaps, trash has a street credit that Satyajit Ray simply cannot compete with, a counter-canon kind of joy that insists on and prides itself in being outside of what is considered tasteful and tactful.