Why We Love Our Bollywood
When you are so grandly in love that you sing and dance with your beloved in a shopping mall or a park with fifty other dancers with you to celebrate your majestic love, wearing so many colors that your audience would be left with redefining the meaning of rainbow, you must have entered the therapeutic land of Bollywood.
But that’s only just the beginning. In the stories written by God of romance and executed to perfection by a team that knows the heart of her audience, this epic tale of cheesy love never ever ends, and we are in love with our Bollywood for forever for that reason.
Many folks in the industry hate this term but I want to use it here this way anyway. I am sorry. Indian cinema sounds too technical. And we want the cheesiest of the cheeses. Our Bollywood.
We want our Bollywood giving us forever these, most of the times, simple straightforward stories of two folks falling in love, their love banned and banished by the families caught in caste or religion or for one of the many other god forsaken reasons, and the eventual reunion of the lovebirds for eternity.
No, not all movies are like this. There are many masterpieces of cinematic art that will put most cinema Gurus to shame but this is not what this article is about. It is about the cheesiest of the cheeses.
I ended up watching one recent movie called Kalank set up during the times of India Pakistan partition telling of a story of a few forbidden loves: in between a Hindu married woman and a Muslim blacksmith, in between a rich landlord and a prostitute, in between a dying wife and her devoted journalist husband, in the later case somewhat forbidden by the tragedy of death.
My sister warned me of the poorly made movie. But I wanted my Bollywood. I was looking for an instant therapy for my depression. And it worked. Like it works. Every single time.
Anyway so the story moves through these forbidden love stories with gorgeous colors of the heroine’s rainbow clothes against unexpected desert landscapes,
many random dances erupting time and again in the poor neighborhood and the brothel,
really royal and larger than life backdrops, soft music, dancing music, sad soundtracks,
an exceptionally good looking man on whom we shall continue to shed our light on in many upcoming stories here,
many lovely Kathak dance sequences by a classic beauty of Bollywood,
lots and lots of melodrama beautifully played by my favorite girl with big Kajal eyes,
the gangster father now turned sober (my childhood crush),
climax with violent action instigated by a wannabe villain at the railway station where the hero must die while the heroine is shouting for him from the leaving train extending her hands( our standard favorite scene of Bollywood).
Really you don’t need to know anything else. The movie by itself is really poor in terms of its pace, story telling skills, cinematic flow, common sense. But that’s not why we are here.
We are here for Bollywood’s unfaltering faith and belief in everlasting love and the never ending celebrations of it. This is the only reminder I need at this point of my life and this age. I am sure you do too.
Our worlds are being constantly challenged by narrative of hate. Let’s not get lost in the fight. Take a break. Watch that Bollywood movie. Love is very much alive. ❤️
“Pyar na karne ki hazar wajah mil sakti hai darr ke bazar mein … lekin pyar karne ki sirf ek wajah dhoondni hoti hai apne dil mein”
“You’ll find thousands of reasons in the market of fear for not falling in love … but you have to search for only one reason in your own heart to fall in love” — Dialogue from Kalank the movie
~
Vaishali Paliwal
