Dhobi Ghat

It’s been a long time since I got a movie that I got so involved in that I never once even felt like getting away. Given that I have a very short attention span, that’s a really hard thing, I must say. Frankly, I don’t remember the last movie that I saw in a non-theatre environment which I watched without any distractions.

This is the best “Mumbai movie” I’ve seen, I must say. By the end of the movie, as the end credits rolled, I had the same feeling that I did when I watched Taxi Driver (incidentally, that was on a plane to New York), which I consider to be the quintessential “New York movie”. It’s hard to explain what it was about this movie (Dhobi Ghat) that got me so hooked. But the movie did make me miss the (mostly miserable) four months I spent in Mumbai back in 2006, and any movie that does that deserves credit.

There was a combination of things that got me hooked to the movie. Firstly, there was a weird connect I felt with the Aamir Khan character, especially in an aspirational sort of way (given that I aspire to a “hippie lifestyle” like his in the movie). Then, Monica Dogra plays an investment banker on sabbatical, and it’s only natural I connected with her. And then there was  the length. At an hour and half, the movie is extremely “crisp”, and when the movie ends, it leaves you asking for more.

Then, there was something about the Monica Dogra character here that reminded me of Poorna Jagannathan’s character in Delhi Belly (I had a huge argument with the wife, btw, about Poorna’s hotness. The wife believed I was getting turned on only by her character in the movie and she’s not “inherently hot”, and that I’m a wannabe. I won’t go into furhter details here). And the way she (Monica) speaks Hindi reminded me of Yappings. Don’t know why.

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