X is a great artist doing impeccable service to the art X excels in.
X is an alcoholic and also abuses people.
Some people still love X for the class and others hate X for the crass.
(Solve for X. hehe. Don’t don’t. It’s OK.)
How we filter out certain qualities of people to like or hate them is amazing! We can ignore all bad qualities of someone who does something we like and we ignore all good qualities of someone whom we love to hate. For example, Salman Khan. Some die-hard fans completely ignore the sub-judice cases he is fighting in cases ongoing from more than a decade which involve some deprived humans and animals of National Importance dying. For them, he is the role-model whose dialogue deliveries without a shirt on give more pleasure to people than people mocking him for the same. Another example, Steve Jobs, who was a great visionary who changed the face of technology people use. But he was also a ruthless eccentric individual who was expelled from his own company and he sometimes treated his subordinates with utmost disrespect. There are actors who have divorced more number of times than they do movies per year and we have scattered on both sides of spectrum opinions for them based on our biases. They have their personal lives and their profession should be separate. They full right to do whatever they want but where’s the boundary over which we as fans need to decide whether we should peep into the hole or not.
Now since we are on the Internet, let’s insert Godwin’s Law into our discussion. What if I were a fan of Hitler’s paintings and had no connection whatsoever to the holocaust on any level? Although this analogy is very far fetched (as many others when Godwin’s law is invoked), not caring for the death of 6 million people is insanity but when does love for some artists override the other crimes/immoral/unethical stuff they do. We love our rock bands when we know that half of the time they are neck deep doped. We love Eminem even when we know what lyrics his songs contain. How was Indira Gandhi back to power after the debacle of Emergency? How has Modi’s fanbase exponentially risen now, although we all know that 2002 shames us again and again? How can we put a blind eye to certain events and rejoice over others? How can we relish 100 Rs. Ice-cream at a parlour and ignore the wailing beggar just outside.
I was in Hyderabad for few months and didn’t hear anything bad about Ramalinga Raju even when for me, it was a huge setback personally which costed me almost 2 years professionally. Just because he gave employment to many people there.
When we all follow double standards, and we all do no matter what we claim, the act of being on a higher ground morally based on our personal biases is a proof that we all are, bigots.
