Filmmaker Prakash Jha and actor Bobby Deol have responded to controversies around their new web series, Aashram 3. Featuring Bobby Deol in the lead role of a self-proclaimed God man, the series has had two successful seasons on MX Player and the third season premieres on June 3.
Activists of Bajrang Dal had allegedly vandalised sets of Aashram in Bhopal in October 2022, they also threw ink on the director. The attackers alleged that Aashram portrayed Hindus wrongly. “Prakash Jha wrongly portrayed the arrangements in a Hindu ashram in its previous seasons by showing the exploitation of women by gurus,” Bajrang Dal’s Sushil Surhele told reporters in Bhopal at the time.
Asked about the controversies surrounding Aashram, Bobby told Dainik Bhaskar in an interview, “I am a very simple person and I stay away from whatever happens in the world. My family is the same. We will answer the questions that are being asked. I am an actor and I want to play characters that are different from what I am. Stories are written based on whatever is happening in our society, so that we identify with those. It was challenging for me to play a bad person, a villain that I am playing for the first time in my career. When I can show people a character that I am not, that is when I feel like I am doing good work. “
Prakash Jha also told the Hindi daily, “I always say that there will be people who create controversies. But for each one who objects, there will also be thousands ones who support your vision and see it in the way it is meant to be. There will be people who see it with the correct point of view. Whom should we talk about? They will voice their concerns, but I think about the thousands who see my project in the correct manner. It is no joke that 1.5 billion people watched it. If we say there will be no objection, it is not right. “
Claiming that the attack on his sets of Aashram in 2022 did not affect him, Prakash Jha had earlier told news agency, “It was only a one hour show. Some guys came and created mayhem and went away. After that was taken care of, we went back to our shoots and completed the schedule of the day. These things are expected in our society because we have all kinds of people. They will behave rationally or irrationally, so I look at it in a natural way. It came and it went.”
Aashram 3 stars Aaditi Pohankar, Chandan Roy Sanyal, Darshan Kumaar, Anupria Goenka, Adhyayan Suman and Tridha Choudhury, alongwith Bobby who plays Baba Nirala.