Here's the thing: nepotism in Bollywood is not an aberration. It is the norm.
There is nothing wrong about it in the same way lot of wrongs are normalised in society. Nepotism exists in politics, majorly; you have the Gandhis, the Yadavs, the Paswans, the Abdullahs in the North. Down south, you have the Karunanidhi family.Nepotism has not been able to raise its horns in sports as much as it has in cinema and politics because the worth of a sportsperson is measured by statistics and performance visible to all. Politics, on the other hand, is a game of rhetoric. And cinema is, well, smoke and mirrors.
Coming back to nepotism in the film industry, the logic behind it is the same logic that applies to a doctor wanting his son to be a doctor, a carpenter wanting his child to be a carpenter, a grocery-shop owner getting his kid to drop from school and join the 'family business' so on and so forth.
A child born in a star-household grows up with the belief that yes, "I'll be a film star!" The producers stay ready. The race begins: who will be the first to sign them? Soon enough, an entire coterie of people, including producers, PR agencies, the paparazzi and showbiz media get together to make sensations out of people who have literally never appeared on the big screen.
Now, star-kids can fail. Multiple times. The time they have in hand to deliver flops before they may be, somehow, probably, kinda-sorta become a saleable face is more than the time an outsider gets. Dia Mirza and Kareena Kapoor arrived in Bollywood at the same time. At the start, both were equally less-talented as the other. Dia was prettier though. Nevertheless, Kareena got the bigger films. Dia did not. Both Kareena and Dia kept starring in flops but Kareena thrived because there was a machinery already in place to ensure that Kareena does not not become a star!
Sometimes, nothing can help you. Case in point: Imran Khan, Jackky Bhagnani, Abhishek Bachchan, Uday Chopra, etc. Sometimes, an outsider, thanks to her talent, luck and the right people noticing him or her, manages to break though the nepotism industry and make it BIG
Film-making is a family dhanda, like any other dhanda. The reason nepotism in cinema particularly gets a bad reputation is because film-making has glamour attached to it. The lure of stardom is why millions travel to Mumbai every year to make it in Bollywood. Nepotism in Bollywood will never end. It is ingrained in the industry's DNA and to remove it is a fool's dream.!
