Personal Thought: `Little things' make lot of difference 

So called `King Khan' of Bollywood reacted to Union Health & Family Welfare Minister Anbumani Ramadoss advice to the famed worthies of filmdom, like the Big B and SRK, not to be part of ads depicting them smoking that makes lot of difference in our youngsters. While one must agree with Ramadoss advice but his exceptional picking up of the two big worthies of Bollywood was wrong. Ramadoss should have extended such advice to the Tamil superstar Rajnikant as well, who too does lot of mimicries with cigarettes in his films. So, in that way SRK's quick reaction to Ramadoss that the Minister do not pick on such a `little thing' is just but when one looks at the over-all position, SRK shouldn't take it as little things.

As he knows very well that the Indian psyche, particularly the mind-set of our young, growing generation is quite adaptive. The deeds of film stars in celluloid play lots of havoc in the young mind. The latest culture of school boys playing with service pistol/revolvers and shooting down their classmates is adopted from the films. There are lots of other things which are imbibed as it is by the young minds. In this era of great information explosion and the influence of the electronic Media where more film based programmes are on air 24x7, where these Media too survive on various advertisements of the filmy biggies, what the Union Minister cautioned was genuine with a view to prevent health hazards spreading like wild-fire in the coming generation.

For a person like Sharukh Khan, because of his name, fame and the financial worth, these things may look little, but when a professional like the Union Minister, who has concern on the over-all health aspect of the Indian public, he was right to warn the educated, influential and rich sections of the society to set emulative examples for the lesser privileged, poor or marginal sections that too have a right to come up to the normal standard of living. Therefore, these so called big money bags, instead of contributing to more pollution may churn out more positive ideas as to how they too can reverse the scenario for a positive change.

RK Kutty