Nepotism had become the big bad word in film industry. The issue has been raging for a couple or more years now. With Kangana Ranuat taking up the issue in a big way, it became a point of debate in all of Bollywood. The issue was further ignited with the death of Sushant Singh Rajput. Despite the death of Sushant Singh Rajput and the great Indian debate thereafter, the fact remains that the issue of nepotism has kind of calmed down a bit in the Hindi film industry.
So, when Charmme Kaur of Puri Connects posted a byte of director Puri Jagannadh speaking about nepotism, it comes as a bit of a surprise. While much has been said and written in Bollywood, debate on ‘nepotism’ has been a strict no-no in Telugu film industry.
In his brief talk, Puri talks about it in a way that reminds one of his mentor, Ram Gopal Varma. Puri starts off by giving an example of how a mother feeds her child the one chapathi she has. He labels this as nepotism. He goes on further and says that the mother might consider giving a piece of the chapathi to the boy next door. Puri labels this as cronyism. Not stopping there, he adds that the same mother would close the door on the boy from across the road as he does not mean anything to her.
Puri then justifies nepotism by saying that the rich and powerful would want to pass on their wealth and success to their children and it was only natural. The Pokiri director enlightens that where there is poverty, there will be no nepotism. A rickshaw puller’s son will not fight to be the rickshaw puller, he clarifies.
Whatever his reason for talking about nepotism at this point in time, Puri’s fans seemed to be miffed by his philosophy on social media and most of them tried to divert attention from Puri’s musings by asking about updates of his next film Rowdy.