We should have
written this a long time back. “Laziness, thou art a heartless bitch!”
I am not an
ardent cinema enthusiast and certainly not a movie fanatic. In fact, in none of
the myriad parallel universes seething in the vast ocean of cosmic hyperspace
am I even mildly obsessed with the chronicles of the celluloid. Having said
that, I’d like to take a stand here this day. Courtesy, the excruciating long
vacations, I’ve spent an unbelievable part of my time before LCDs, delving into
the tinsel world on the other side of the screen and these escapades have
rendered me aghast this summer.
It amazes me to
see the kind of cinema we celebrate today.
The movies, they
are a bizarre concoction of senseless story-lines, predictable scripts,
pathetic screenplay, puerile dialogs and absurd performances, thriving
primarily on scintillating romance, lewd comedy, hideous action or lately even
erotic (read erratic) thrillers. Flourishing in utopian settings and depicting
implausible scenarios, these films, save a few, are barely a reflection of the
society- 120+ unbearable minutes of undue drama and frenzy.
TV serials and
soaps, I realized, go still more miles in serving the viewers the most
unrealistic settings where apparently anything happens to anybody anytime.
Precariously laid on similar story-lines of a shrewd woman who looks ravishing
in her typical wicked smile (aka the ‘Vamp’) tormenting an innocent woman who
looks beautiful in tears (aka the ‘Lead’), these serials are pathetic attempts
of uselessly dragging a long lost story line on and on. The creators (assuming
they are) do this incessantly either by deliberately developing some ‘setting’
between the leads (who always live in filthy rich homes and bungalows and are
all “businessmen”) based on some current Bollywood chartbuster or by their classical
‘frame repeating’ or ‘frame dragging’ sequences of ‘Nahi… Nahi… Nahi…’ or
‘Slap… Slap… Slap…’ as the audience (the woman folk) watches, gripped and dumb
struck all the while. The newly budding reality TV is another blatant slap on
the face of reality, prospering on revelations and sensationalism.
Today, there
remains very little scope on the big and small screen for capturing the common
man’s plight, the realistic struggles, social encounters and emotional turmoil
he encounters in the real world every day. In fact most of our so called successful
movies, TV and reality series are exhibits of sheer plagiarism, hopelessly
derivative and unoriginal- clumsy remakes of old flicks, horrible adaptations
of their English or American counterparts, utter misinterpretations of classics,
unnecessary sequels to past hits and glorification of some hitherto unknown
literature. There is no creativity employed in the cinematography. Just films
and serials made for the sake of making, with popular faces roped in (even
‘item numbers’ incorporated) to raise box-office revenues or TRPs. The
perplexed viewer is left browsing the idiot box, surfing through channels for
something worthwhile and truly entertaining.
It’s not that
the scene is absolutely hopeless. There are people doing justice to cinema in
their own ways but their count is very low. Yes, given that we resort to the
virtual world to relax and ease our senses and shed logic and reason for a
while to escape from the real world, but at the end of a weary day, person only
wishes to see something comforting with the entire family and this event,
sadly, today is statistically unlikely to occur.
It’s the way we
spend our time that makes us who we are. We have had works in the past that we
are proud of and which are a standing testimony to our enormous abilities.
Today we ought to start being and believing in ourselves, feel proud of our
identity, look inward and around for a billion beautiful story-lines unveiling
themselves every moment in our great nation. All we need is an eye for
observation and an elegant way of storytelling to capture these wonderful experiences
on the reel- ‘Lights… Camera… Action…’
