doublethink

Linking the nation: Bollywood ways In my last post I talked in some length about how newer means of technology, especially trains, have always found a prominent place in the cinematic portrayal in Hindi cinema. The range of emotions that are depicted through trains are wide, varied, and least to say, interesting. From a close camera-shot of tracks and a speeding train signifying escape, displacement, migration, and not the least death to those of scenes of crowded railway compartments in which the lovers’ eyes still managed to meet (for instance Amol Palekar and Tina Munim starrer Baaton Baaton Mein (1979), railways have remained integral to the ways in which individual sensibilities of a character in Hindi cinema has been depicted. But they signify more than that, at least in Bollywood. They signify a link, a connectivity that joins territories and groups. They signify a medium through which a nation is conceptualised. They signify a continuum through which that perceived or real (wh...

More than ten years before, when I think I was still a kid, I heard this song from the movie Hindustani (Kamal Hasan starrer): “Telephone dhun mein hasne wali, Melbourne machli machalne wali…”(The woman who laughs like a ringtone, the woman who gyrates like a Melbourne fish). I don’t know if Melbourne fishes have some special skills to imitate Bollywood jhatkas and matkas but anyways coming back to the song, it further says “Sona sona, cellular phone tum ho na, computer ko lekar bramhaand rachaya kya”, which would translate something like this: Oh Dear you are like a cellular phone, have you created this world with your computer? Funny, isn’t? I simply call it banal. But err, actually it’s imaginative too. Think about this: we have a fairly long and quite monotonous tradition in Bollywood of comparing our heroines with chaand, i.e. moon. Remember the unforgettable “Chaudvi ka chaand ho…” or “Ye chaand sa raushan chehra” from 1960s and 70s? But now, we have something interesting to co...