There and Back Again

Wow. 2010 has started and its January 25th already. I guess I’ll begin the year with two more mini movie reviews. Courtesy of Air India, they were what I watched on the flight over to Bangalore on December 10th and back again on January 2nd.

Anna doesn’t quite understand my fascination with Bollywood. I guess I must have looked a bit odd on the flight. The passengers seated around me were all Indian and tuned into the English channels on the in flight enter

tainment. I was the only one watching the Hindi movie! This obsession, if you like to call it that, began around 1999 when we were working in Pakistan. The first movie that really fired my imagination was Kuch Kuch Hota Hei with Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol. I guess it has something to do with the catchy tunes, the elaborate dance sequences, the melodramatic acting and the corny dialogue, the set piece plots which are often total fantasy and yet rooted in the culture of the subcontinent and its interactions with other cultures. But Bollywood has come a long way from that stereotype, and has grown up in many ways.

I haven’t had the chance to watch much on offer in recent days, and so I was considerably impressed with the quality of both “Delhi 6”, on the way out, and “Love Aaj Kal” on the return journey. The latter was a cute and contemporary love story, and the cultural nuances were painted by juxtaposing the contemporary relationship with one of twenty years ago which is played out in a series of flashbacks. Delhi 6 was also good, not only because of another excellent soundtrack by A R Rahman, but in the way it expresses the life of the community in a corner of Delhi as an often confusing mix of ancient and modern, tradition and superstition, mixed religious sensibilities of the older generation and the yearnings and passions of the younger.

Kind of sums up our trip to India - that totally sensory overload of smells, sounds and colour that hit us between the eyes on landing in Bangalore, and followed us to the beaches of Goa. It was the combination of ancient and modern, the go-ahead 21st century city, bursting at the seams with energy and struggling to keep up with itself, and the calm and serene way of life of the Goan coast and countryside being ruthlessly taken over in the name of tourism. More about these themes later, I am sure.