EVERYONE knows about the Bollywood nepotism of children of famous celebrities unfairly getting a cinema career break and how most will ultimately become failures.
Film flop Arjun Kapoor, who is the son of producer Boney Kapoor and nephew of actor Anil Kapoor, is a perfect example of that. Perhaps the most ridiculous product of nepotism in recent years is someone who doesn’t have a blood relation to anyone famous.
Aayush Sharma hails from a political family and got his foot in the film door after he married Salman Khan’s sister Arpita Khan. Despite having no acting experience, like top TV stars who have starred in hundreds of drama serial episodes, he was launched as a Bollywood hero by his superstar brother-in-law with Loveyatri (2018). The backing of Khan couldn’t stop the musical romance from becoming a box office disaster.
Sharma revealed that he had given around 300 auditions and not been cast in a movie prior to being launched in that film. Not even a small supporting role. That should have demonstrated his unsuitability of suddenly becoming a leading man.
A still from the movie Ruslaan
He later confessed to apologising to Khan for wasting his money on that movie. (He should have also promised to find an alternative career).
Undeterred by the failure and obvious signs that Sharma was not leading man material, Khan then decided to produce and co-star with him in 2021 action-drama Antim: The Final Truth. The Bollywood adaptation of successful 2018 Marathi film Mulshi Pattern also turned out to be hugely disappointing.
The catastrophic results of his first two films didn’t stop a clueless producer from investing in Sharma’s third movie Ruslaan. A large part of that silly decision would likely have been him having famous in-laws.
Being part of an inner Bollywood circle meant that the recently released movie got some high profile endorsements, including from his famous brother-in-law.
That couldn’t stop the action film from being massacred by critics and killed at the box office, as it opened to near empty cinemas. Sharma tried to prove he could carry an entire movie, despite the previous two failures. Instead, he showed that a lack of talent and screen presence couldn’t be masked by him having a famous family connection through marriage. It turned out to be the biggest disaster of his career so far, and something pretty much all experts had predicted would happen.
The three big failures will unlikely prevent him from landing further films as an actor, ahead of far more deserving newcomers, including top TV stars with huge fan bases.
It shows that Bollywood won’t learn harsh lessons of how nepotism has made this perhaps the worst era in Hindi cinema when it comes to new talent that can take the industry forward. Although Sharma is a small part of the problem that is having a destructive influence on Hindi cinema, he is one of many such sub-standard products of nepotism.
Aging heroes with too much power like Salman Khan must also take responsibility for inflicting talentless relatives on audiences, including his own brothers Arbaaz Khan and Sohail Khan, who both had failed careers as film heroes.
Sharma now adds to that sorry list and hit a new nepotistic low. The Bollywood fraternity hasn’t learned any lessons because there are many more such extended relatives set to be launched as leads, so the new talent pool will get worse.
Migrants in a dinghy crossing the English Channel
Sunder Katwala
