JOIN USAcross generations of audiences, films continue to play on minds long after ‘The End’ rolls out. That’s the power of cinema, writes Vasanthi Hariprakash.
“Tumhaara naam kya hai Basanti?” Try staying indifferent to movies, when you answer to a query like that. In a compartment on the train from Jamshedpur, at a dhaba in Punjab’s Bhatinda, at a friend’s house in UP’s Aligarh, wherever father was posted, that would be the line when people got to know my name. Or another: “Train kyon, tumhaari Dhanno kahaan hai?”
Living down my famous tonga-driving chatterbox-namesake in the blockbuster Sholay was impossible even if I feebly protested, “Lekin mera naam toh Vasanthi hai. Vva..”
Cut to decades later, as I sit in a dark theatre, I can totally relate to the heavily pregnant heroine telling a cop in a Kolkata police station: “Mera naam Biddha nahi, Vidya hai. Vvi..” The cop busy writing the FIR says, “Haan madam, wohi, Biddha. Biddha Bagchi.”
If you are an asli film fan, you wouldn’t need my notes to tell you that Dhanno was a mare that made up Hema Malini’s horse-cart in Sholay. Or that it’s Vidya Balan who has moved on to another fine act as Mrs Bagchi in Kahaani. You would simply get the (Dirty) Picture.
As an Indian, you would just understand why people offer gallons of milk to a cutout of a film star. Buy up tonnes of flowers to garland posters. Block traffic near the theatre on big film release days. Go out and massively vote a superstar to power even if he has zero political experience. Or ambush a Mumbai hospital and later keep a tab on tweets to find out what’s the name of the baby born in India’s Filmy Family No. 1.
Tumhaara naam kya hai Beti B?
This is also the country where in the 60s, you wouldn’t name a baby boy ‘Pran’ even if you loved that four-letter word that meant ‘life’. No chance! Your life’s love named after a notorious ‘villain’? Never mind that Pran sahib, one of the finest yesteryear actors to grace the Hindi cinema screens, must have taken it as a compliment.
So, when does fondness for films turn into a craze or obsession?
Every Indian family is bound to have had someone who turned a different animal every Friday: The day a new movie would be out in a theatre. First day first show would be a celebration. And if in the first row, a ruckus. Coins thrown at the screen as soon as the hero arrived. Catcalls and whistles as the heroine smiled.
My brother-in-law would boast of how he bunked college just to watch “the bike race scene” of Naa Ninna Mareyalaare over 16 times in the 70s. “Two rupees ticket in Gandhi class”. But what a rush of adrenalin watching Kannada supremo Rajkumar playing a race biker, romancing “young, beautiful and tender” Lakshmi in the tea estates.
My husband Hari reels off a number of magical moments that have stayed with him from the movies he grew up watching: Raj on the Rajdoot, his Hosabelaku shirt ‘collar’, Vishnuvardhan’s kadaa, worn on his left hand, Lakshmi’s ultracool cap and bellbottoms, Arathi-Srinath’s chemistry in Puttanna Kanagal’s Shubhamangala, and the skiing song scene in Rajkumar-Jayamala-starrer Premada Kaanike.
“The ski and the snow left those of us who had never stepped out of South India totally awestruck. And the only way we could have more of that was by going back to the theatres to watch the scene again, and again.”
Noted filmmaker Chaitanya Karehalli recalls how Premaloka turned out to be the rage and Ravichandran the icon of “our times”. “I remember how college-going guys my age started looking for saxophones and sax classes to ape the way he wooed Juhi Chawla in the movie. The walkman had just come in, and Hamsalekha’s music was magic, the way it would boom in one ear after the other. Every other house in Bangalore would have its songs playing on the tape recorder.”
Chaitanya, who rates Premaloka as the “most stylish and technically brilliant movie to be made in South India then — Mani Ratnam hadn’t yet happened,” is himself a classic case study of what a movie means or does to its viewer. Pretty Woman he watched 28 times, Forrest Gump 15 times, and that not-so-pretty horror holocaust called Schindler’s List at least six times in theatres! “I would volunteer to watch Forrest Gump with every friend who hadn’t... of course, they would be annoyed as I could reel off every dialogue, every scene, and hum scores before they came in the movie.”
Influences of watching “Schindler’s List as an artistic piece for its lighting, work of the greatest cameraman of those times”, is bound to have had its influence on his own work in movies like the acclaimed Aa Dinagalu, but ask Chaitanya if we as a country take cinema a bit too personally and he says, “In India, it’s about seeing and being seen seeing. It’s like Holi, a community activity. We scream, we get up and dance, we comment loudly for our neighbours to hear. We go with large families. In many ways, movies are, or at least used to be, a joint family activity.”
Today’s reality though is that the repeat audience has gone, at least from the theatres. With the coming of YouTube and easy movie downloads on one’s own phone and laptops, movie halls have lesser ‘houseful’ boards. “Viewers have told me they have watched DVDs of my movies, but waiting in a queue and braving the crowds to rewatch a movie doesn’t happen any more,” says Chaitanya.
But that filmi funda seems to have an exception this day, this age: Rajnikanth starrers. Every movie release of his is an (national, these days) event. S Shriram, in his mid-30s, who in his day job is a retail and consumer behaviour specialist, is a “Rajni fan for life”. I recall once being invited by Shriram, a day prior to a Rajnikanth-release where he had hired out a hall at a multiplex ‘exclusively for superstar’s fans’.
I ask Shriram what he would do if some day he actually met his idol, and got a few minutes with Rajni sir alone? “I would cry for the first two minutes! Ok, that might be an exaggeration, but if he was still around, I would be shell-struck. I dont think I would ever be able to convey to him what he means to me. For me, he is the only one, but for him, there are millions. How can I tell him what I have learnt by just watching him for 25 years — not just flipping a cigarette, but also to have a high self-esteem and yet keep a low profile...”
Somewhere, the impact a movie has on our own lives is the effect of what its actors say or do on-screen.
And in India, what they say or do off-screen too.
When, in the movie Padaiyappa, Rajnikanth tells his daughter who offers him first a piece of her birthday cake: “Mother first, everything next. Including God”, fans like Shriram connect that line instantly to Rajni’s devotion to his own mother in real life, whom he is said to have lost in his early years.
“A few days back, my own company had invited Shahrukh Khan and I could have easily been introduced to him, but while hundreds of people waved out to him, I didn’t stir from my seat. I know he is a superhero, but I don’t connect to him. That’s the difference between a matinee idol and a superstar.”
One person’s ‘disconnected’ superstar seems to be another’s matinee idol. Shahrukh’s US-returned Mohan in Swades tugged at Poornima Krishnamurthy’s heart while she herself had been in the US for 18 years. For those who haven’t watched the flick, Mohan, the NASA scientist, returns to his roots and literally ‘empowers’ his village in India.
If a Swades inspired some NRIs to do their bit for their motherland, a Taare Zameen Par is sure to have taught many teachers and strict parents to spare the rod and not apply pressure on their special child, after watching little Darsheel Safary suffer trauma, thanks to his parents and the education system.
For photojournalist Bhargavi Rao, it was a lesson for a lifetime she got after watching only one episode from the epic of Krishna-Sudhama on good old Doordarshan. “I clearly recall Sudhama’s tear drop when he offers one grain of food to Lord Krishna. That day, I told myself to never ever waste food,” she says.
Across generations of audiences, films continue to play on minds long after ‘The End’ rolls out. Like for young dancer Maatangi Prasan: “Whenever I am low, I watch Jab We Met. Kareena Kapoor’s character Geet gives me the hope that I can also manage to get a good life!”
Well, if you ask which movie has had that kind of impact on me, the list is long. Sometimes, it could be only a song. On days when things just don’t turn out the way you want them to, I hum to myself:
Kabhi kisi ko muqammal jahaan nahi milta,
Kaheen zameen to kaheen aasmaan nahi milta.
No one gets a perfect world anyway, as Nida Fazli wrote and Bhupinder sang soulfully in the 1981 movie, Ahista Ahista. So, why this Kolaveri di?