Actor Adil Hussain thinks that the Government does not allocate enough funds for the arts. The actor said that it was ‘sad’ that the NFDC got only Rs 30 Crore annually to promote cinema.
“It is unfortunate that NFDC gets only Rs 30 crore to make meaningful cinema for a population of 1.3 billion people. This is when they have to fight the monstrous market of commercial cinema which spends that much amount only on advertising one film. So here, you can understand the priorities of successive governments and we are paying the price for that,” he said.
The power of arts is such that if we spend enough money to promote it in schools and colleges, we’d automatically reduce the need to spend so much on national defence, declared Adil.
“If we recognise artists from all the disciplines and consider it [art] an important subject right from primary school, believe me, we will be spending way less money on our defence budget than what we are spending now,” he said.
The actor’s opinion might sound bizarre, but recent studies have proven that ‘high concentration of arts’ in a particular city can be directly linked to ‘higher civic engagement, lower crime and high child welfare’.
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The actor also rued the current state of Indian cinema, and said that he felt ‘underused’.
“I have realised that the kind of rigour that I am used to while doing theatre is not demanded out of me in movies. Not even 10 per cent of it. This includes even the best of the films that I have done. I feel I am underused, unexploited… my artistic thirst is not fulfilled at all,” Adil added.
The actor plans to keep his film career on hold, and concentrate on theatre till December this year.