What Moves Us?

The other day, sitting in the darkened surroundings of of the full-house Cinestar Cinemas at Deira City Centre, watching the new, much-hyped Hindi movie, Love Aajkal, I was forced to wonder what it was that drove us to be such obsessive, compulsive consumers of the same "Shaadi-Pyaar" theme - what is it about Bollywood that remains so ingrained in our blood that we faithfully head off to catch the first-day-first-show of yet another love story that revolves the formulaic hero-heroine-villain-singing and dancing around trees-plot to kill-parents-denoument.....why subject ourselves to three hours of nonstop, mindless entertainment? As an NRI, I have to say, I believe there's some justification for this behaviour - Hindi movies for me, and all my countless countrymen who do faithfully turn up to watch each one, I am sure, have become a panacea for missing India and home - our culture, traditions, beliefs, attitudes and all that makes the quintessential Indian are reflected faithfully in these flicks - yes, even when half of them are based in London, New York and Sydney! My husband refuses to join me on these movie trysts, saying, "Phew! Imagine subjecting yourself to three hours of unadulterated rubbish! Pyaar, pyaar, pyaar, shaadi....don't they really have anything more informative to talk about?" Well, the point is really, do people who go to these movies, actually go there for information or plain "masti" and entertainment? Of course, they don't want to hear all the serious developments in the world of climate change and fluctuating oil prices...they are here to simply switch off from their grim and often not-so-palatable realities....so of course they are more than delighted with seeing the same thing again and again! Why not? We all understand love, we all understand ambition and the need to become successful, our lives are all about fuelling aspirations and striving to meet them! And that is exactly all the Hindi movie promises to provide - three hours of absolute "suspension of disbelief" - heroines who are glamorous and efficient dressed in fashions to die for cavorting around places most of us would only have seen on films! And that feeling of fulfilment at the end of three hours when the lights go up and the final credits scroll on, is hard to explain to someone who bad-mouths these films! When Shah Rukh Khan manages to beat up the bad guys and win the heroine for himself, we all sigh and rejoice in our hearts - because it seems like there is some justice after all on God's green earth.....naive, foolish, sentiment? Well, tell that to the audiences that have fuelled and sustained the world's largest film industry through good times and bad!