Vivek Agnihotri has often said that he is a changed man. He refers to his current self as Vivek Agnihotri 2.0, where he has a less left-leaning political thought and more realistic approach to filmmaking. In a recent chat with DNA, the filmmaker opened up on this change in ideology and why he is unbothered by people trolling him for it.
Agnihotri was a self-confessed leftist for several years even as he firmly sights on the right of the political spectrum now. Every now and then, people dig out his old tweets to accuse him of hypocrisy as his views today are in conflict with many statements from the past. Reacting to it, The Kashmir Files director says, “Anyone who digs out my old tweet and say ‘you used to say this 10 years ago’, I want to send them a packet of chocolates. I want to thank them. This just means I am changing. When you meet me for Delhi Files in 2024 or 2025, if I am still saying the same things, then shame on me. I cannot live a life where I am not changing every day. Every day is a new day with changed things. I don’t want to live a static life. That way, it is a good thing that people dig out tweets and I want to thank fact-checkers who dig out such old posts.”
Talking about what prompted this change in ideology for him, Agnihotri paints a dim view of leftist thought and says, “Change happened because I lived my life as a leftist for a long time, for much of my life. But when you have kids, you understand a lot of things. I was thinking what will these kids take away from India when they grow up and if they go out. And I realised that we are a country of the world’s greatest philosophy because of which we have survived for so many centuries. But because of leftist ideology, you start hating everything about your country. Wherever I was going in the world, I was hating everything. I decided it was time to get grounded, rooted, and real. That changed me.”
The filmmaker says that with that change, his approach to cinema also changed a lot. The man who once made Chocolate and Dhana Dhan Goal has shifted tonally to more hard-hitting dramas now. “I changed with experience and age, particularly when I travelled across India and I saw the real India,” he says, adding, “Not that I was not exposed to that India but this was the first time I saw it as a filmmaker. I saw there are so many stories that nobody has ever told and that is the biggest crime filmmakers have committed in the country.”
As he talks about how filmmakers have let Indian stories down, Agnihotri reserves special disdain for Karan Johar and Shah Rukh Khan’s brand of cinema. He says, “After the advent of Amitabh Bachchan as a superstar – not the one from Deewar but one from Shehanshah – the cinema after that never told real stories. Especially Karan Johar and Shah Rukh Khan’s cinema, that has actually damaged the cultural fabric of India in a very disastrous way. So, I felt it was important to tell real, honest stories.”
