Death by love/ Reel love?

The cherubic heroine gets into the city bus without taking a second glance. The hero looks at her with surprise and remorse. The bus starts and catches speed. Our good-looking young man drops his bike in haste and makes a last minute dash for the bus. Love is all he needs he realizes. As he paces up the road panting he makes a handsome leap towards the door. He traps the heroine between his athletic arms and peers into her eyes. Catcalls, woots and shrieks reverberate the theatre. Dulquer Salman has just managed to make a thousand hearts pound with love. Mine just cringes and wants to duck for over.

This is a scene from a movie where a young and working couple, soon after a couple of coffees and a bunch of cutesy zingers decide to move in to a plush PG accommodation, replete with artistic walls and dotted with Fabindia furniture.  Predictably they tumble into love and holy matrimony thereafter. But were there scenes to show the deepening of the relationship? No. Perhaps the mundane and the triviality of everyday romance? Definitely not. The director doesn’t care to tell us what makes the couple tick, or what happens after the love butterflies in the stomach flutter away. But yes for all fluffy romance the end cure seems to be marriage he seems to say. This from a director who made the mature ‘Alaipayuthey’ is a cause for worry. “Five steps backwards!” I shout. But should I blame him? He will ask me, doesn’t art imitate life?

I inhabit a world colonized by digital natives who spend way too much time perusing though social media. I live in the era where beauty is routinely instagrammed and life is filtered to perfection. We crave for instant pings and faster Internet. It’s a generation that places enormous importance on the visual aesthetic and will therefore lap up any movie as long as it looks visually stunning. Perfect locales, exuberant cinematography and great looking actors. We will pack the theatre to the rafters. Superficiality be damned.

Personally, I don’t remember when I took the monumental step from being an incurable romantic to one who cannot watch a romantic movie without wanting to sigh every half an hour or hold my head in agony. I furiously skip the ‘Romedy’ channel on TV. I deplore romance novels. Valentine’s Day brings out my worst. But this from a girl who cried while watching ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’, and worse ‘Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.’  Not my proudest moment, but its been a learning curve. Hence there is hope. Through my long road to salvation, I have learnt that most women suffer from a delusion, a misconstrued idea of love thanks to these picture perfect rom coms. Women have high expectations out of love, just as men have about women, and their bodies.

But all one is needs is good old reality to ruin life. A good lashing from a heartbreak, a couple of failed relationships and evolution occurs.

Have I become the cynic, the one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing? Truth is painful, but it sets you free. You soon realize that no guy isn’t ever risking boarding a running bus for you. No one ever waits in the pouring rain just to hear you mouth ‘I love you’. Guys who write songs for you are seldom found and ones who remember very moment they spent with you do not exist.

Movies preach love. But they never tell you that love comes in all shapes and sizes. Some times distorted, and most of the time oblivious to the naked eye or guarded heart. Or that the best kind of love is finding a person who you can talk to for hours and be comfortable sharing silence. They never tell you that romance is not just a phantom kiss or a stolen glance. It’s feeling alone yet not lonely. Mostly, it’s becoming a nicer person.

Now that old age has set in and wisdom has bloomed, let us bring on the melancholy ones, the dark, somber movies that have layers to analyse and make one sob.

-Originally published in the column 'Pop Pourri', The New Indian Express, Bangalore August 27th 2015