Bollywood Blues

Our wild estimates on the depth of our connections with Bollywood would most certainly be far from reality. Involuntarily we have grown up getting heavily influenced by the multi-billion dollar show world. We wouldn’t be very wrong if we conclude that most of our personality has been shaped by filmdom.

Let’s begin with our kids: With formal training or not, the next generation of kids appear to be born singers. The songs are usually the chartbusters of that month. We all know about the immense grasping power of children. Feed them with any kind of stimuli, it just sinks into them. And exposure to Bollywood has never been more easy & full-fledged; what with the 24 hrs movie channels, posters all across the city & also on the public transport, newspapers offering reviews, timings, advertisements, interviews related to Bollywood… Mostchildren exposed to Bollywood in the early years (3-5 yrs) talk flawless Hindi without the parents even contributing! Of course there is the current sensation: Mr.Yo Yo Honey Singh whose lyrics always linger around pubs, party, daaru and vodka… A very clear invitation for the teenagers – who adore his tunes. (Yes Sir! He has a fan following!)

From singing to dancing. Here we are not limiting to kids. Whatever little dance we display, be it just swaying of arms or gyrating butt in the bathroom & pub (those are the safest places to save yourself from the embarrassment) is learnt thanks to the choreography of Bollywood. The flow of dance steps is easier with couple of pegs down the throat. The supple among us try to ape Prabhu deva, Hrithik Roshan, Shahid Kapoor or the latest sensation Lauren Gottlieb, while the josh walas are more into Govinda. There are the high inertia ones who settle for Sunny Deol or Big B. Well, the ladies are at a disadvantage – the dancing standards are quite high among heroines (it’s a question of survival; cos most heroines survive on dance & glam quotient)

Our fighting skills – both verbal & physical – are somewhat polished by filmdom. These days we come up with out of the world logic to counter someone. And what better way to pick up abuses than the movies? Also without wearing any of the colourful belts, we know the nuances of martial arts and can faintly dodge any onslaught, without letting the attacker get away with whatever he / she intended to…

The dialogues, oh my god! If only words could kill, Indian population would be less than half of the current billion. While some lines have a short shelf life, other lines, perhaps from Mr.Bacchhan or Rajani sir, are always greeted with whistles & claps. Some of these dialogues have attained immorality. Try the variety: “Tera kya hoga Kaalia”, “Maine ek baar commit kardi, toh khud ke bhi nahi sunto..”, “bade bade deshon main aisi choti choti baath hote rehte hai”, “Don ko pakadna mushkil hi nahi namumkin hai”, “… aap purush hi nahi… maha purush ho, maha purush”,  “Dosti ka usool hai madam, no sorry, no thank you”… These dialogues, apart from teaching us pick-up lines & humorous one-liners, often give us a moral to get enlightened & to live by.

Style. The single main source of styling ideas are the movies. The tiny patch of beard below the lips in Dil Chahta hai became a rage and still is. Ajay Devgan’s mush in Gangajal or Once upon a time in Mumbai, the C-O-O-L chain of Shah rukh in Kuch Kuch hota hai were all short term fashion statements. It’s lot more intense among girls. We see frocks & chudidaars named after movies selling like hot cakes in garment shops. The hairdos, the colour combinations, shape of blouse, design of kurtis are just some of the items inspired by films. Some husbands may have got furious after the behavioural changes in their wives after watching Sonam Kapoor splurge in Aisha. If only girls could ape size-zero or the perfect hourglass figures…

In a country where love & love-making is not a popular topic of group discussion, the best tutor for these are the movies. In the past couple of decades falling in love has become a mandate among teens or those in early twenties. So much that if you don’t flaunt a girlfriend or a boyfriend, you are looked upon as an alien and slowly you sink into a complex. Who else can teach us how to patafy a girl, flirting skills, flowery talks, chivalrous gestures… not just the skills, the intent & the courage required for falling in love & standing for it, against all odds, is also drawn from the movie powerhouse. So what if there are a few who are into bhaag ke shaadi karna mode? All is fair in love & war.

That said, lovers have actually started going against all odds to make their love stories successful – and why not? When the movie stars can do it, why can’t we? Where they fail is when they don’t get to see much on what happens after marriage (most Bollywood movies end when the boy & girl have run their marathon and tied the sacred knot…) or are they trying to ape their idol’s off-screen life? If Aamir Khan & Hrithik Roshan can get out of wedlock, why can’t we?

We can go on and on correlating our lives to Bollywood. Ultimately the take away is that life as portrayed in the movies is not always close to reality. Like Morpheus says “The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this...” Although there are the likes of Anurag kashyap & sometimes Ram Gopal Verma who try to show real life on screen, most screen stories are predominantly fictitious and made larger than life with a sole purpose of entertaining the audience (& reap the harvest out of the box-office in the process). It’s totally up to us to choose what is good for us, what inspires us, what can be adopted & then shun aside the unwanted stuff… If we do not want to get into that kind of dilemma, we may as well just sit back, relax, pop a corn & enjoy the offering.