Time & Perspective Quote by Ajay Devgan

Ajay Devgan is doing something actors rarely get credit for: staking a claim that popular cinema isn’t escapism so much as a kind of cultural seismograph. By invoking smuggling in the seventies and corruption today, he compresses decades of Indian public life into a neat relay race of anxieties, suggesting that the “villain” in mainstream storytelling is whatever the country can’t stop talking about at that moment. It’s not nostalgia; it’s a timeline of what felt structurally broken.

The phrasing is careful. “Simply” lowers the temperature, as if he’s offering a plain fact rather than a defense. “Smuggling was an issue” and “corruption is an issue” are broad enough to avoid naming parties, scandals, or institutions, which keeps him out of the political blast radius while still sounding socially alert. The key verb is “smuggling” itself: it implies movies are slipping reality past the censors of comfort, packaging current anger into digestible plots where justice is visible and decisive.

“Faithfully reflect” is the tell. It’s an aspirational word that flatters the industry as responsive and responsible, even while it quietly dodges the harder critique: films don’t only mirror society, they also manufacture its common sense, teaching audiences what to fear, who to blame, and what “fixes” look like. Devgan’s intent reads like a legitimacy play for commercial storytelling - entertainment as reportage by other means, with the hero as a proxy for the public’s unmet demand for accountability.