Awards are a distraction. We love them because they give us a clean ending to a messy story. In the case of Boong, the shiny new trophy on Lakshmipriya Devi’s shelf is the full stop the industry has been looking for. It’s a win for indie cinema. A win for the Northeast. A win for the PR teams currently drafting "India on the Global Map" templates.

Then comes Randeep Hooda. He didn't just clap; he narrated. "At a time when Manipur is healing…" he posted. It’s a loaded phrase. It’s the kind of thing you say when you want to sound like a statesman while holding a smartphone in a temperature-controlled room. It’s "actor-speak" for "I’m paying attention," even if the attention is filtered through a high-resolution screen.

Let’s talk about that "healing." Manipur has been through a meat grinder. Over 200 dead. Thousands displaced. Internet blackouts that lasted months—long enough to make a tech journalist go into actual physical shock. The state didn't just have a bad week. It had a systemic collapse. So when an A-lister uses the word "healing" to frame a film award, you have to wonder who the medicine is actually for.

It isn’t for the people in the relief camps. They aren't checking their X feeds for BAFTA updates. They’re worried about whether the road to the market is open or if the local paramilitary is having a bad day. The "healing" narrative is for us. The viewers. The consumers. It’s the digital equivalent of a Hallmark card sent to a disaster zone. It makes the tragedy digestible. It gives the conflict a silver lining it hasn't earned yet.

Boong is, by all accounts, a miracle. It’s a small-budget win in an industry that usually prefers loud, CGI-heavy nationalist fever dreams. But the friction here isn’t about the art. It’s about the optics. The cost of a global awards campaign—the flights, the consultants, the strategic screenings—could probably fund a local hospital in Imphal for a year. That’s the trade-off we don’t talk about at the after-party. We celebrate the "visibility" while the actual people being represented are often struggling to keep the lights on.

The algorithm loves this stuff. It thrives on the intersection of tragedy and triumph. A director from a conflict zone wins big? That’s a 10/10 on the engagement scale. But the tech that carries Hooda’s message is the same tech that was throttled for months in the very region he’s talking about. There’s a bitter irony in celebrating "global reach" on platforms that were legally darkened to keep the world from seeing the actual mess. It’s a digital ghost town being used to sell a comeback story.

Hooda is a pro. He knows how to play the "gritty intellectual" role. He’s the guy who loses thirty pounds for a biopic. He cares. Or at least, he cares enough to signal it. But calling Manipur’s current state "healing" feels like looking at a house fire that’s finally run out of things to burn and calling it "renovating." It’s a shortcut. A way to bypass the uncomfortable reality that things are still very much broken.

The film industry treats real-world pain like a seasoning. A dash of conflict makes the victory taste more "important." It adds weight to the trophy. Without the "healing" context, it’s just a movie about a kid looking for his father. With the context, it’s a Geopolitical Event. It’s Branding. We swap the stench of tear gas for the smell of expensive perfume because the latter fits the feed better.

We see this everywhere now. The "healing" isn't a process; it's a pivot. We pivot from the uncomfortable reality of ethnic violence to the comfortable reality of a red carpet. It’s easier to celebrate a film than it is to fix a state. It’s cheaper, too.

So, yeah. Congrats to Devi. She did the impossible. She made art in a place where survival is the primary occupation. But let’s not pretend a gold statue is a bandage. It’s just a shiny object reflecting the light of a fire we’d rather not look at directly.

How many awards does it take to fix a broken supply chain or a severed social fabric? Probably more than the industry is willing to produce.