‘Nahiiiiiiii, tum aisa nahi kar sakte!’
This wasn’t Hema Malini moaning from the telly, but an eight year old me responding to my mother’s call to help her out in the kitchen. This was me decrying the very injustice and unfairness of it all with the same passion and outrage that Hema Malini reserved for her vilest of villains. It was wonderfully handy, all this drama available at the right time.
Is it only the drama of cinema that indelibly binds it with our lives or more? Or its communal nature? It’s an activity we do with friends and family, one that we share with hundreds of strangers in theatres solely bound by the love of dreams coming true on the big screen. Why else do villagers flock to that single house with a TV? And why else is travelling cinema a cause for celebration in these parts? The sense of community that comes from sharing a vicarious dream-fulfilling experience is commanded only by cinema in our nation. It binds us together, somehow even more than cricket.
Every corner you turn, you find something ‘filmi’. Be it in a woman’s hairstyle, or a man’s swagger, in a street urchin’s china-made ware for sale, or in giant-sized posters of Bollywood celebrities endorsing brands, irrespective of themselves. The times of my 40s born father fashioning his hairstyle after Dev Anand is no different from young boys in our times fashioning theirs after Salman Khan in Tere Naam, or sporting six packs like their favourite Khans. It is aspiration that urges a girl to do her eyebrows like Shilpa Shetty or lips like Aishwarya Rai; an aspiration to be as loved and famed as their favourite stars and characters. As much as this aspiration is unhealthy, wouldn’t life be a tad bit lesser without it?
Aspiration, the offspring of desire, makes cinema lead us where it goes, easily making us believe the myths it sells. How else does one explain the allegedly Baazigar inspired murders, alleged suicides at Rajesh Khanna’s marriage and mothers refusing to name their children ‘Pran’? Why else is their a need for censorship and appropriate audience guidelines? Consciously or subconsciously, whether we accept it or not, cinema is a big part of our psyche.
In every city, in the heart of every film buff, is that special cinema hall, the city’s icon, where he allows his favourite stars to woo him. Amidst scores of mindless flicks is that one film that has touched you beyond words, shifted something inside; moved entertainment into art and relaxation into thought. From chilling to killing, to seeing the world in newer ways that are beyond our imagination, pieced together for us by imaginative and innovative minds, cinema constantly reforms our lives into an organic whole, telling us a bit more about ourselves through reflections we find onscreen.
This attribute of cinema, to reflect us back to ourselves, glossed up or not, comforting or shattering, piercing our reality with illusions and vice versa, is probably why it continues to morph but survive through time. Because cinema influences us in more ways than we can imagine. Re-piecing another version of reality, far-removed from our psyches and showing us a perspective we wouldn’t have known otherwise, in less than 3 hours.
I suppose, the most important aspect of cinema’s agelessness is its act of preserving our history and showing us a glimpse of the future, by documenting where we come from, showcasing where we are at and hinting at where we are headed. As long as this is alive, “Aal izz well’.
(Fatema Kagalwala is a 2nd year Film Editing student at FTII)
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