KYA YEHI PYAAR HAI- Is this love?

Now… please wait friends, this is not some philosophic treatise on love and neither is it a love story ( you can get all that in Kaleidoscope not here!). I have been inspired to write this post after watching two movies over the weekend!

The first one, a Tamil movie called “ Myna” is all about the “love “ of a young man for a girl who he had rescued along with her homeless mother and brought into his village to live with an old lady who is conveniently all alone. The movie starts with the couple as children and moves on to adolescence ( hers) and youth (his)! This is a recent movie and has apparently won a National award.

The second one is an old Hindi movie from the 1980s- “Dhund”-a murder mystery where an abusive husband is supposedly murdered by his wife. The wife had fallen in love with another man who was sympathetic to her condition and she takes on the blame of the murder thinking it was her lover who had murdered her husband. The story of course, follows a lot of twists and turns and you know towards the end that neither of them had actually murdered the husband!

Now, I am not questioning the plot or the story of either film but what struck me were the extreme manner in both cases that this emotion called “love” was being portrayed. In  “Myna”  you see the hero pedaling away on a cycle to generate electricity so that his beloved can study for her exams during a power cut ( If my daughter were not asleep during this movie, I would have used this to show her how the “ dynamo” that she studies about in physics operates!). You also see him run with a huge knife attacking anyone who tries to prevent him from approaching his girl.  In “ Dhund”  you see the heroine telling right at the beginning of the film very dramatically to a stranger who discovers the murder “ I killed this man!”.  She also faints with a scream when the prosecuting lawyer announces in the courtroom that the accused ( the lover) be hanged!

I used to wonder if love really makes people behave like this? I agree that some of us are given more to theatrics than others but really, is all this necessary to show that one is in love? I find that much of such behavior gets internalized and learned by the audience of such movies particularly the youth who probably think this is how they are expected to act when in love.  There was this boy Albert who used to run errands and  serve us coffee in the office where I worked some years ago. While working late one evening, I was surprised to find him in the kitchen area his eyes closed and face grimaced in pain. When I went closer I found that he had slashed his arm. After pulling the knife out of his hands and getting a couple of colleagues to come with first aid, I asked him the reason for his behavior. Eyes filling with tears he told us about how the girl he loved was getting married to someone else! Not to belittle his love, but I had to control myself from bursting out laughing when I heard this story. Albert had never spoken to this girl and had only watched her from the kitchen window, so what was all this drama about her having rejected him? There is a similar incident involving another young man again, someone who was a messenger in another office where I have worked. So, what was it about both these chaps? I think besides ,their youth, it was their complete involvement in the world of cinema which defined for them how they should behave.  The second young man was beaten up once by some “public spirited”  citizens for having been perceived as harassing a girl. Poor guy, in his scheme of things, if Vijay can chase a girl in the streets and sing her into loving him then why not him? The trouble is when movies draw a very thin line between love and sexual harassment then both the stalker and the stalked think that there is some other angle to it!!

I think somewhere along the way, most of our film makers need to learn how to portray love and its various manifestations. It is not about running around trees or chasing a pretty girl. I do agree that in the two hours or so that they have our attention, they need to take us through the lives of the hero and heroines but isn’t that what creativity is all about?  Not to say that there haven’t been film makers who have attempted it successfully ( “Jab we met” being a very good example)

And folks, rejection in love- there has to be some other way to portray it – besides the hero holding a glass or the heroine trying to jump off a cliff? Defeatist attitudes popularized by the biggest one of them all –  Devdas ! How about showing a person surviving the break moving on and then may be finding someone else? But I guess that is maturity –something difficult to find among our film makers who have mentally remained frozen in teenage!