Standup Comic Jaspreet Singh Slams Bollywood For Stereotyping The Sikh Community For Years

India is known for its diversity. There are literally thousands of religions, cultures, languages, music, architecture and food that constitutes our country. However, since it isn’t possible for everyone to learn about all of them in a single lifetime, people tend to turn to the most accessible medium of representation: Bollywood.

Now, the problem with Bollywood is that they love to stereotype their own countrypeople. If it’s a Bengali person, they’ve to love fish. If it’s a college student, they must have perfect, silky hair and so on and so forth. But the community that’s been dealt the worst hand by them are the Sikhs.

So, stand-up comic Jaspreet Singh decided to take a deep dive into the various ways Bollywood has stereotyped the Sikh community and essentially educate people that they’re more than just a Santa-Banta joke.

Jaspreet Singh’s deconstruction is based on the latest Akshay Kumar movie ‘Kesari’. He says that the first thing about it that sticks out like a sore thumb is the protagonist’s beard, which by the way does look fake. In addition to that, through snippets from other movies, he criticises the movie’s writing for reusing jokes that he has been hearing since his college days.

After that, he does a point-by-point breakdown of how Sikhs have been portrayed in movies and how Johnny Lever is the worst offender when it comes to playing Sikhs on-screen.

1. The Sikh disguise.

2. Johnny Lever’s portrayal of Sikhs > ‘Udta Punjab’.

3. The formula for pro-Sikh movies.

4. Where’s the normal Sikh guy?

You can watch the complete video here:

As far as I can remember, Ranbir Kapoor’s ‘Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year’ is probably the only film that avoids all the stereotypes that Jaspreet mentions. But that’s just one movie out of around 50 movies. And that’s definitely not a good sign for an industry that’s located in a country with such diversity.

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