The extraordinary Love affair with love
Thursday, June 17, 2010Posted by
Sureshkumar
0 Comments
Love , it is an existential crisis . It is a crisis of much bigger magnitude and scale than that of hunger ,death ,religion ,world wars,and rising cost of petrol and itch gaurd ! so what is love , and more importantly why oh why is love ! ? is there any purpose . I dont see a dog devdas/romeo , or a cat paro/Juliet ! yet love in effect is always and almost certainly sexual . I mean the love that I am talking about , which is the existential crisis could only be sexual
Love as seen by an average Indian film maker
My early exposure to things other than Indian or some outsider perspective was from the numerous firangi phoreners who came visiting my monsoon clad Kerala . There was this beedi sipping couple from Amsterdam (To protect the identity of Sam and Rosy I am not revealing their names), to whom I showed numerous malayalam/tamil/hindi/telgu films . Being the Indian kid I was , I judged a film by the number of fights and the height of the fall hero took to save the heroine . And of course songs make or break any average Indian film . So the universal theme of every single one of them was LOVE . Action stories have love , thrillers had love , There was not a damn film without hero or heroine s . Ofcourse there was this rare one or two released once in every one thousand two hundred ninty seven years which dealt with things other than love , or fight , or revenge . But they were not meant to be seen by humans with ordinary thinking or Indian thinking . it was an exercise of intelligence only meant to be suffered in a dark theater with depressing silence . .
So love was everywhere in an Indian films . in fact so much so that the thing which made one movie different from other was perhaps different actors . So you had the same story repeatedly and shamelessly told for over a hundred years . Only with very minor costume changes . and of-course music was slightly changed . Earlier it was an influence of carnatic music , With Maestro (So called) Ilayaraaja with same tune and raaga for every song . But they were sad . Reminded them of their failed love affairs .Some times so sad that , concept of sadness as a feeling was introduced first time to the growing kids only by these songs . The prime example would be the following link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8a01hyNlh4
So here is the Hero of the film , Mr Quintessential hero of any south indian love story . he is so sad that he did nt even get the time to shave . So he sings this song
Vellai pura ondru ponathu kaiyil varaamale
so it was so pathetic to hear this song and this sadness ,that usually females and males even dogs , fell in love and was ready to do anything , so that this guy may stop singing and shave his pathetic beard . So it was sympathetically pathetic love !
I guess if it was nt for the literature ,songs and films there just would nt be any love . Why would there be love . what was this existential feeling of being incapacitated without the presence of certain someone in your life . I have heard sane sensible reasonably intelligent guys being greatly depressed when they were ,like denied their interests (romantic/sexual)in a certain members of opposite sex . Of-course it was mathematically impossible for the most attractive female in the class to be in love with almost sexteen guys in the class .But our raging and often boiling hormones was blind to mathematics , physics ,biology and general logic too.So we all fell in love at the same time with the same girl(s) So it was love traingle and quadrilaterals
But was it really love , The love which I had felt for her .
Well she was as I told you almost three times ,The most attractive in our class , And I was studying in Second standard . I dont know what had made her so attractive , being Eight years old , I was almost her age . She was not as attractive as Shakeela or reshma for that matter (they are mainstream hollywood actors in Kerala ) But she was slightly fair (the universal factor which made people feel attractive or attracted ) And she had this pencil box which made weird electronic sounds when she opened it . And yeah I was extremely shy and self conscious in front of her . I used to sing , songs aloud , Just to make her notice me . And in school bus , when she sat in front of my seat , I constantly watched her . some times , some rare times , When I fell down , or sang songs , she looked at me too . It lasted for three milli seconds , May be even less . But that was like .. some moments etched in my little tiny irregularly beating heart . It was when I was in eighth standard , Roughly at the age of fourteen , that we had telephone connection in our home . It was an exciting time. She being what she was , she had a telephone almost immediately . Yeah it was fashionable and innocent back then to ask for people s number and it was easy to figure out people s number from through the directory . So we used to talk . . And we used to talk . And god the conversation lasted for almost twenty five million lifetimes for the almost two three hours Come to think of it , it was a hopelessly dull conversations. But it felt good to talk .it felt sexually right to talk , normal . Even at times I felt proud that I was almost having a steady telephonic relationship with a girl of my Kindergarten dreams
Soon our lives took us to different streams . Me was mostly unemployed and uneducated except for my masters . She remained dumb despite her degree in Medicine . Then we met other people and so conveniently forgot ..each other .She was nt that beating heart , mesmerizing angelic female . was this the fading love . this was repeated , The whole cycle of extraordinary females and their falls to ordinary mortals ..many times
But each time this cycle had left me feel more empty than previously , Each of the cycle of life , had wiped my belief in love stories as told by films , songs and literature . People were people , Just ordinary or extraordinary as you yourself are . You just see them with this magnifying glass . which make you feel sad , after you realize that they could fart ,snore ,and smell
yet the vicious cyle of love letters and telephonic conversations continue . As they say wars are due to the hopelessly depressing boredom , so is love . Although completely illogical and serving no purpose for evolution , Love continues to exist . In-fact evolve and refine itself into poems and great world literature . It fuels passion , kissing s , and depressions of us . . the hapless humans trapped in our want to love and be loved . Love may be god , But its absence surely invites devil !
Love as seen by an average Indian film maker
My early exposure to things other than Indian or some outsider perspective was from the numerous firangi phoreners who came visiting my monsoon clad Kerala . There was this beedi sipping couple from Amsterdam (To protect the identity of Sam and Rosy I am not revealing their names), to whom I showed numerous malayalam/tamil/hindi/telgu films . Being the Indian kid I was , I judged a film by the number of fights and the height of the fall hero took to save the heroine . And of course songs make or break any average Indian film . So the universal theme of every single one of them was LOVE . Action stories have love , thrillers had love , There was not a damn film without hero or heroine s . Ofcourse there was this rare one or two released once in every one thousand two hundred ninty seven years which dealt with things other than love , or fight , or revenge . But they were not meant to be seen by humans with ordinary thinking or Indian thinking . it was an exercise of intelligence only meant to be suffered in a dark theater with depressing silence . .
So love was everywhere in an Indian films . in fact so much so that the thing which made one movie different from other was perhaps different actors . So you had the same story repeatedly and shamelessly told for over a hundred years . Only with very minor costume changes . and of-course music was slightly changed . Earlier it was an influence of carnatic music , With Maestro (So called) Ilayaraaja with same tune and raaga for every song . But they were sad . Reminded them of their failed love affairs .Some times so sad that , concept of sadness as a feeling was introduced first time to the growing kids only by these songs . The prime example would be the following link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8a01hyNlh4
So here is the Hero of the film , Mr Quintessential hero of any south indian love story . he is so sad that he did nt even get the time to shave . So he sings this song
Vellai pura ondru ponathu kaiyil varaamale
so it was so pathetic to hear this song and this sadness ,that usually females and males even dogs , fell in love and was ready to do anything , so that this guy may stop singing and shave his pathetic beard . So it was sympathetically pathetic love !
I guess if it was nt for the literature ,songs and films there just would nt be any love . Why would there be love . what was this existential feeling of being incapacitated without the presence of certain someone in your life . I have heard sane sensible reasonably intelligent guys being greatly depressed when they were ,like denied their interests (romantic/sexual)in a certain members of opposite sex . Of-course it was mathematically impossible for the most attractive female in the class to be in love with almost sexteen guys in the class .But our raging and often boiling hormones was blind to mathematics , physics ,biology and general logic too.So we all fell in love at the same time with the same girl(s) So it was love traingle and quadrilaterals
But was it really love , The love which I had felt for her .
Well she was as I told you almost three times ,The most attractive in our class , And I was studying in Second standard . I dont know what had made her so attractive , being Eight years old , I was almost her age . She was not as attractive as Shakeela or reshma for that matter (they are mainstream hollywood actors in Kerala ) But she was slightly fair (the universal factor which made people feel attractive or attracted ) And she had this pencil box which made weird electronic sounds when she opened it . And yeah I was extremely shy and self conscious in front of her . I used to sing , songs aloud , Just to make her notice me . And in school bus , when she sat in front of my seat , I constantly watched her . some times , some rare times , When I fell down , or sang songs , she looked at me too . It lasted for three milli seconds , May be even less . But that was like .. some moments etched in my little tiny irregularly beating heart . It was when I was in eighth standard , Roughly at the age of fourteen , that we had telephone connection in our home . It was an exciting time. She being what she was , she had a telephone almost immediately . Yeah it was fashionable and innocent back then to ask for people s number and it was easy to figure out people s number from through the directory . So we used to talk . . And we used to talk . And god the conversation lasted for almost twenty five million lifetimes for the almost two three hours Come to think of it , it was a hopelessly dull conversations. But it felt good to talk .it felt sexually right to talk , normal . Even at times I felt proud that I was almost having a steady telephonic relationship with a girl of my Kindergarten dreams
Soon our lives took us to different streams . Me was mostly unemployed and uneducated except for my masters . She remained dumb despite her degree in Medicine . Then we met other people and so conveniently forgot ..each other .She was nt that beating heart , mesmerizing angelic female . was this the fading love . this was repeated , The whole cycle of extraordinary females and their falls to ordinary mortals ..many times
But each time this cycle had left me feel more empty than previously , Each of the cycle of life , had wiped my belief in love stories as told by films , songs and literature . People were people , Just ordinary or extraordinary as you yourself are . You just see them with this magnifying glass . which make you feel sad , after you realize that they could fart ,snore ,and smell
yet the vicious cyle of love letters and telephonic conversations continue . As they say wars are due to the hopelessly depressing boredom , so is love . Although completely illogical and serving no purpose for evolution , Love continues to exist . In-fact evolve and refine itself into poems and great world literature . It fuels passion , kissing s , and depressions of us . . the hapless humans trapped in our want to love and be loved . Love may be god , But its absence surely invites devil !
