Mind Blogging. Mind Boggling.

 I attended a great course called ‘Culture in Media’ in Undergrad in 2007. As part of the course, we watched the 70s movie ‘Deewar’ starring Amitabh Bacchan in his classic angry young man avatar. As a mafioso, he faces off against his brother the cop, essayed by Shashi Kapoor. Some of the commentary and discussions in our undergrad class focused on how the movie reflected the anger and frustrations of the youth against the Indian state, during those times.

During the 70s right through the 90s, the shambolic and helpless depiction of the cops symbolized the state of the Indian state. Financial health in decline, the country was tottering towards the balance of payments crisis of 1991. The Naxalite movement was burgeoning. Arch enemy Pakistan’s  GDP per capita was 1.5x of India in 1970, and Pak replaced India as the numero uno Hockey team in the world, winning Gold in 1968 and Silver in 72. The only bright spot seemed to be the 1971 victory in the battlefield against Pakistan. The Nana Patekar movie Prahaar demonstrates the situation well- the hopeless situation of the common man, contrasted with the effectiveness of the military.

While anger in the form of ‘angry young man’ was one response, the other reaction was escape. Escapist romantic love was the overarching theme of big Bollywood movies. A deep romantic love can lead to a complete loss of one’s logical faculties and convenient escape from the realities of day to day life- which I read later are actual neurological side effects (albeit momentary) of deep romantic love.  Suddenly, the courting couple are in Switzerland! How did they get to Switzerland from Dadar in a blink of an eye! And how can they dance and sing at the same time! Where are the drums playing? Those dance moves are ridiculous!

So many big movies of the time had this romantic love form of escape from reality. The desperation to escape (via the route of romantic love) was to the level of SRK chasing Kajol in DDLJ despite her refusal to entertain him. Message to the viewer caught in a gritty job and hopeless circumstances – try hard and find this romantic love at any cost. It allows a beautiful escape. Apart from dangerously encouraging stalking, this era of movies created a foolish exaltation of romantic love which I believe would have affected many impressionable young minds of the generation, including me. I had a complicated relationship with romantic love in my teens and 20s, on one hand despising and ridiculing the Bollywood depiction, but at the same time desperately seeking it and going weak in the knees at times, Bollywood style.  I avoided using the word ‘love’ in the ages 18-28- it was too loaded.

The escapist romantic love shown in Bollywood was also not the right kind of romantic love to demonstrate to vast audiences. ‘Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction’, said Antoine de Saint Exuperey, something a mature me resonates with. The romantic love of Bollywood rarely depicted the nitty-gritties of looking outwards in the same direction.

The romantic love of the 70s-80s-90s not only caused escape but overruled and ultimately defeated other kinds of love. In DDLJ, romantic love was the ultimate manna towards which paternal and maternal love were subservient or worked to enable. Love towards one’s work could not be talked about, because work itself was hard to come by, and if it came, it would likely be desultory and dissatisfying. Private sector was small and the uninspiring yet sprawling public sector was parodied in shows like ‘Flop Show’. ‘Love siblings, parents, or neighbors’ would imply a grounding of the screenplay in the domestic mileu, which was to be avoided because of lack of material comforts and the poor state of housing, sanitation, and public services. ‘Love friends’ was difficult to show because ‘friend-zones’ such as college or travel were not common. ‘Love nature’ was not possible, because the world then was in thrall of industrial and human invention, and the zeitgeist was of humanity ‘conquering’ nature. The conservation movement was yet to take off seriously.  

The term 'love-story' was a common term when discussing a movie plot. It referred entirely to escapist romantic love. So 'love' in this definition did not refer to all the other kind of loves (parents, siblings, friends, community, work, nature, hobbies, what not). Together, these other loves can play as big, if not a bigger role, in many lives, than romantic love. There could have been fantastic stories woven around those loves too. 

These thoughts came to me at a spiritual event I attended recently, chaired by Nipun Mehta (who by the way has done lot of good through the organization he founded called Service Space). My friends RR (a regular volunteer) and NP were also with me in what was a beautiful evening. So in the middle of some other point he was making, NM said something on the lines of expressing love towards others, and casually added ‘not like the Bollywood kind of love’. This was not even the key thrust of his talk, just a sidenote. However, it stimulated me to put down these thoughts which I’ve often blustered about in bits and pieces to friends and family over the years.

To some extent, I concede that the conclusions I've drawn might be somewhat amiss due to my limited knowledge of Bollywood movies. I’ve watched few Bollywood movies compared to many friends. So my data set might not be big. Happy to engage and be corrected!

Labels: Cinemas

# posted by Ashwin Ravikumar @ 8:54 PM 0 Comments