{"id":1097,"date":"2016-07-03T12:32:38","date_gmt":"2016-07-03T12:32:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=1097"},"modified":"2026-07-17T13:58:58","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T13:58:58","slug":"tubelight-salman-khan-sohail-khan-india-china-bollywood-little-boy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=1097","title":{"rendered":"Never Go Full Tubelight"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

T<\/span><\/p><\/div>

here\u2019s a \u201cBhai\u201d film in the theatres and it\u2019s time for bhai-jaculations. Everyone has their own routine to join the celebrations, and my preferred one is to get completely trashed and land up right in time for a front-row experience of the last show on the first day. The alcohol-induced daze transports me head first into the universe of Bhai fandom, where every dialogue is whistle-worthy and every Salman Khan entry is met with the metal clink of coins hitting the big screen. From punch to pout, I join the raucous cheering blindly, seeing in him the messiah we seek in all of us.\n\nWho the fuck cares if the world is going up in flames when Salman is there to save us? Come hell or high water, if it\u2019s a Salman movie, there will be a Bhai moment, and usually therein lies my redemption and justification for a bitch of a hangover.\n\nSo like the characters in Waiting for Godot<\/em>, I waited for that \u201cBhai moment\u201d of emotional crescendo, but it never seemed to arrive. Or maybe it came so often that I never really felt it at all.\n\nSalman\u2019s Laxman, the Tubelight, is the centre of all jokes in the small, fictionalised border town, where the army descends for a recruitment drive during the Sino-Indian war of 1962. \u00a0Salman plays a \u201ctubelight\u201d, a colloquial term for someone with perceived intellectual disability. With his distracting bulk, he tries to pull off being vulnerable and childlike but ends up being endearing in the way a really annoying goat is endearing. There are moments where you want to feel for him, but mostly you just want to whack him. On a scale of Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man<\/em> to Ajay Devgn in the I Am Sam<\/em> remake Main Aisa Hi Hoon<\/em>, Tubelight<\/em> edges frighteningly close to the latter. But in Salman Khan\u2019s defence, no Bollywood film has ever approached even close to the former.\n\n\"tubelight\"\n

\n

I\u2019m not a cynic and I understand that hope and faith are powerful words, but they\u2019re not as hollow as Tubelight<\/em> tells you they are.<\/p>\n

Tubelight<\/p>\n<\/figcaption>\n<\/figure>\n\nIn Tropic Thunder<\/em>, Robert Downey Jr tells Ben Stiller that an actor, even when playing a \u201ctubelight\u201d, must \u201cnever go full retard\u201d<\/a> because it alienates him from the audience. This is pretty much what goes wrong every time the Bombay film industry tries its hand at quintessential \u201ctubelights\u201d. Hrithik Roshan made a career out of saying, \u201cAvon cycle, maa!\u201d in varying degrees of \u201ctubelicity\u201d, while Shah Rukh Khan tried his luck in My Name Is Khan<\/em>, managing to eke out only a sliver of empathy from all of us (credit for which should rightfully go to the screenplay than Shah Rukh himself). Aamir Khan\u2019s \u201cTubelight\u201d moment in Dhoom 3<\/em> was so contrived that it was more alienating than the alien he played in PK<\/em>. But the rightful throne of \u201cThe Tubelight\u201d rests with Ajay Devgn, whose performance was an exaggerated master class of idiot-dom, which made many a Stanislavski student twist and turn in their graves, asking Devgn, \u201cTu Aisa Kyun Hai?\u201d\n\nWhen our filmmakers try to portray people with intellectual disabilities, their representations, more often than not, turn out to be tone-deaf, cringeworthy, and borderline offensive. No matter how endearing the character in question is, or how often he cutely forgets to zip up his trouser, he is always portrayed as an object of pity and scorn, when he is actually supposed to be inspiring. It\u2019s not that these characters shouldn\u2019t be portrayed as vulnerable; it\u2019s just that we never seem to do them any justice, and don\u2019t seem to understand the wistful boundaries that can contain them. Kabir Khan has painted Laxman \u201cTubelight\u201d Bisht with the brush so firmly in his mouth that the end result is not a character, as much as a caricature.\n\nTubelight<\/em> is driven by the \u201cmagic of faith\u201d theme that dominates the narrative, and Laxman believes he can actually move mountains, but all he manages to do is move the audience to yawns. There is so much emphasis that goes into driving home the point about faith that everyone in the film from Mahatma Gandhi, Shah Rukh Khan, Chinese actress Zhu Zhu, to the late Om Puri, keeps hammering it in, up to a point where you begin believing that only faith can get you through the remaining length of the film.\n\nI\u2019m not a cynic and I understand that hope and faith are powerful words, but they\u2019re not as hollow as Tubelight<\/em> tells you they are. They must always be driven by action, but action which in some way contributes to the bigger picture rather than going around in circles of its own.\n\nIt\u2019s not that the film does not have its moments. It has Kabir Khan at the helm after all. Through Mohd Zeeshan Ayyub\u2019s character, Narayan, Kabir Khan makes fine remarks on the idea of nationalism of hate, where he questions hating a minority on the grounds of patriotism. Through the young Matin Rey, there is another fine point he makes on misguided perceptions and nationalistic fervour, when Salman asks him to say \u201cBharat Mata Ki Jai\u201d to prove that he is not Chinese. Broader points on war, humanity, and how it affects soldiers and civilians alike are well-brewed. These scenes shine and provide a glimmer of hope in an otherwise flickering and hardly illuminating narrative that is Tubelight<\/em>. And for fuck\u2019s sake, we know that Salman can ace crying, but not if he\u2019s made to do it 34 times in three hours.\n\n\"tubelight\"\n

\n

Who the fuck cares if the world is going up in flames when Salman is there to save us?<\/p>\n

Tubelight<\/p>\n<\/figcaption>\n<\/figure>\n\nBut in spite of Salman\u2019s very obvious limitations, Kabir Khan has decided to bear the weight of moving Bhai away from the typical \u201cBhai-formula film\u201d. It worked wonders in Bajrangi Bhaijaan<\/em>, where his character takes it upon himself to ensure that a little girl from Pakistan finds her way home all the way from India. The empathy that Salman drew from the viewer was by positioning himself as the silent messiah of the helpless little girl. Where Tubelight<\/em> falters is that it takes the impending weight of empathy for granted. In the Salman School of Acting, distanced entirely from say the Stanislavski method or the Brechtian school, every character must become a Salman alter ego \u2013 kyunki hum sab ke andar ek chhota Salman hota hai!\n\nAs a takeaway for a Salman fan (which I most certainly remain), one wonders what would have been if this film wasn\u2019t completely \u201cde-bhai-fied\u201d. Who wouldn\u2019t have loved to see Salman move a mountain, then stretch his hand out, and pick out Sohail baba from the gloomy cloud of war? If life were so simple, you\u2019d say. But it would\u2019ve still made for an enthralling watch. Not going completely \u201cTubelight\u201d could\u2019ve saved the film from just being a plotless narrative interspersed with a cacophony of songs. We could\u2019ve seen another side of war that a lot of us choose to ignore \u2013 sitting on the sidelines with nothing to do, bored as fuck.\n\nBored (and dehydrated) as fuck, is also how I felt by the time the climax came. At the end of three hours, once the boredom had culminated into a fine crescendo which threatened to put me to sleep, the credits came up and I made for the exit gate.\n\nI may be a Salman fan alright, but this Tubelight<\/em> failed to light me up.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Tubelight, Salman Khan\u2019s Laxman believes he can actually move mountains, but all he manages to do is move the audience to yawns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":133,"featured_media":1101,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pop-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nNever Go Full Tubelight<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In Tubelight, Salman Khan\u2019s Laxman believes he can actually move mountains, but all he manages to do is move the audience to yawns.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=1097\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" 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