This hashtag has been trending again and again for the last few days. The Bollywood in itself is not an honorific word. It sounds like a cheap imitation of Hollywood. I would prefer to say Hindi film industry. My relationship with this industry is the same as that of a laborer to a mill, a farmer to a field and a sportsperson to a field. Obviously, these hashtags hurt me, but I also know that your outrage is not unreasonable. 

We have made mistakes, many times we have hurt the culture of this country in the name of 'liberal thinking', we have been biased in telling stories and many times we have lost our senses to our audience. There was an era, when making fun of gods and goddesses, defaming the Sanatan culture became a habit and identity of Bollywood. But in the last few years there has been a public awakening. You rejected films that viewed our society as biased, but with that came an accident. The weevil started grinding along with the wheat. We suddenly became antagonistic to the entire Hindi film industry. We forgot that our goal is 'reform', not 'annihilation'. 

It is no secret that cinema in Hindi-speaking regions has been grappling with major challenges even before Boycott, the most prominent being the absence of theaters. Even the biggest films are reduced to 3200 to 3500 screens and smaller films, however meaningful they may be, cannot find theaters for themselves. 

The same thing happened with Kashmir Files initially. With great difficulty, the film could garner 630 screens for itself. After Kovid, the owners of theaters were so broken by financial constraints that hundreds of cinema houses were closed forever. The Boycott trend started looming like a curse on cinema halls who were hit by Kovid in the hope of good days to come. I do not consider this trend unnecessary. Perhaps our maddened industry needed some electric shocks, but shocks are given to heal the brain, not to kill the patient.

My concern is that we are not giving this punishment to all those film stars who are sitting peacefully after depositing crores of money in the bank. But we are giving the truth to the Ramkumar who sends his children to school by selling peanuts in the theatre, we are giving the punishment to the boy whose samosas go to the garbage can every Friday with his little dreams. Those rickshawmen who take people to the theatres, those street vendors who set up stalls in front of the theatres, are punishing them.