Tag: bollywood movies

Arranged Scissors 14 – Losing Heart

I’ve been in this market for a while now. It was sometime in February that my mother decided that I had utterly failed in my attempts to find myself a long-term gene-propagating female partner, and that she needed to step in and find someone for me. It was sometime in March that I went to this shady photo studio at DLF Galleria in Gurgaon and got a “wedding profile” snap taken. Later in March, I got listed at some shadymax exchange in Malleswaram. And there was the “market visit”.

The last weekend of this March I was in Bangalore, and was taken to this shady-max exchange in Malleswaram for a “market visit”. My uncle had told me that we needed to go sufficiently early, since there were apparently profiles of six hundred girls that I had to inspect that day, and make a shortlist. We had had a hurried breakfast at a Darshini in JP Nagar and then headed out to the exchange. My uncle, aunt and mother took turns to go up to the counter there and fetch the “smartha brides” files one by one. And I would spend about a minute on each file – which had fifty profiles. The six hundred profiles were done in less than a quarter of an hour. Phallus had simply refused to budge.

Aadisht, via his friend Vishakh, came up with this awesome framework of “head, heart, phallus“. The basic funda is that in order for you to enter into a long-term gene-propagating relationship, your head, heart and phallus need to independently like the counterparty (women insert appropriate substitute into the 3rd component). There is nothing earth-shaking about this framework as another of my friends pointed out, but the important thing is that it distinguishes between heart and phallus. Which I think most other explanations of louvvu (including bollywood movies) tend to ignore. And people also ignore it and get confused between heart approval and phallic approval, leading to disaster.

I had taken a long break from this arranged scissors market – a combination of being generally disgusted, poor health and being in between jobs. Recently (with the advent of Navaratri) I’d gotten back, and realize that I’ve lost my heart. Yeah, you might think this sounds funny but it’s not. I’ve truly lost my heart. And the only good that can come out of this is that if a crocodile catches and threatens to eat me, I can tell it the truth.

This whole arranged scissors concept seems to dehumanize the wonderful concept of long-term gene-propagating relationships. You are expected to make your decisions quickly, and you are expected to design “questionnaires” so as to get the maximum amount of info through each meeting. You are expected to browse through files containing six hundred profiles and make a shortlist. And when you are in the process of making the shortlist, you have your mom and aunt peering over your shoulder with helpful comments such as “this girl’s mouth is too wide” or “that girl’s nose is too blunt”.

For a while you resist, and resolve that you won’t get sucked into this mess. You resolve that you are still looking for “true louvvu” (whatever that is) and won’t settle for a common minimum program. You resolve that you’ll use the arranged marriage exchange as a dating agency. And soon it begins getting to you. You begin to see the merits of judging noses as too flat and mouths as too wide. You start breaking a girl down into components, and giving marks to each, and taking a weighted average to see if it is beyond “pass marks” (ok I’m obviously exagggerating here). You agree to meet potential counterparties even if you know that it’s improbable that you’ll like her.

My head, I think, is doing quite fine. So is the phallus. However, I think I’ve lost my heart. It’s been three and a half years since I even hit on someone. My heart seems to have forgotten how to love, and to have a “crush”. I’ve forgotten how my heart used to react during prior blades. In each of those cases, if I remember right, it was the heart that initiated it, and the head and phallus only gave approval later. Now, I have no clue how that used to happen. That seems so improbable.

This whole concept of meeting people with the explicit intention of evaluating them for long-term gene-propagating relationships is seedy. I think it goes against the laws of nature, and completely ruins that wonderful feeling that one usually associates with louvvu. It makes you too judgmental (I’m judgmental otherwise also, but not this judgmental), and you are so busy evaluating her that you don’t enjoy it at all. And how can you trust your judgment when you know that you haven’t liked the process of judgment at all?

Yesterday I met a friend, an extremely awesome woman. Once I was back home, I sent a mail to my relationship advisor, detailing my meeting with this friend. And I described her (the awesome friend) as being “super CMP”. I wrote in the mail “I find her really awesome. In each and every component she clears the CMP cutoff by a long way”. That’s how I’ve become. I’ve lost it. I’ve lost my heart. And I need to find it back. And I don’t know if I should continue in the arranged scissors market.

Movies and thoughts

I find Bollywood movies thought-provoking. No, seriously. The thoughts that they provoke may not have anything to do with the movie itself, but provoke they do. This is in total contrast to, say, Spaghetti Westerns or James Bond movies, which are excellent tools for escapism. The good movies of the latter kind totally immerse you, have you completely detached from the real world, and are excellent tools to get you out of NED.

Maybe the thing with the Bollywood movies is that they don’t engage you enough. They don’t engage you enough in order for you to be immersed in them. And that leaves you with enough CPU time to start thinking of other things. Then, it is easier to empathise (in some form; maybe some 10% empathy if not more) with certain characters in certain Bollywood movies, which is impossible to do in case of characters such as James Bond or The Man With No Name. And this empathy will end up directing your spare CPU time to thinking about yourself.

Bollywood movies also have a lot of “slow moments”. Passages in the movie where nothing really happens, and this includes the songs. Passages where nothing enough happens, and which allows you to be able to switch off and devote your entire CPU time to the other thing that you are thinking of. Also, the language is generally easy enough that even if you were to miss a few dialogues (when lost in thought), you are able to catch up with the rest of the movie.

Maybe it has to do with the intent of the filmmakers. Whether they intend to make a gripping movie that will help the audience go off on an escapist trail, or whether they want to purposely keep the movie light so that it doesn’t demand much brain power from the audience. Or maybe it has to do with implementation. It may well be the case that someone wants to make a gripping movie, but does such a bad job of it that the minds in the audience start meandering. Or maybe the filmmakers try to make a movie where the audience sees the movie through the eyes of a certain character. But the problem with that is that in such cases, there is the chance that the viewer equates himself with this character, and starts thinking of the similarities and differences, and focuses on himself rather on the movie.

It also depends upon the intent of the viewer, as to what he is expecting when he goes to the movie. Does he want the movie to present him a mirror so that he can see himself in the characters? Mostly not, I think. Does he go for general entertainment? Mostly yes, I think. Does he go to the movie for some sort of an escapist experience so that he can momentarily be detached from his normal life? Maybe yes, which I think signifies a higher fraction compared to “mostly not”.

I don’t see too many movies. Even those that I see are those that have generally been certified as hits. i don’t normally see art-house kind of movies – which are perhaps actually made to be thought-provoking. The last three Hindi movies I’ve seen (approximately) are Jaane Tu… , Jab We Met and Rock On. I have no clue what the intent of each of these movies was, though I would imagine they were made for general entertainment. Each of them ended up holding a mirror to me, and made me ask myself lots of uncomfortable questions while watching. Maybe the last Hindi movie that involved me enough to distract me from myself was Omkara. I wonder which of these movies I should regard as being better – the one that held the mirror or the one that made me detached.

Tenure matching and jab we met

ok this is one of those lazy posts. Takes two earlier posts and finds a connection between them. This is the kind of stuff that bad professors do – take two old papers, find a link between them and publish a third paper. I do hope to become a prof one day, but I don’t hope to write such papers.

if you remember my review of Jab We Met (which I wrote about a month back), I had said that I hadn’t liked the ending. I had said that if I’d written the script, I’d’ve made Anshuman a stronger character, and made Geet marry him; and have Aditya walk away into the drizzle. I had said that this was because Aditya and Geet had added as much value as they could to each others’ lives.

So, now, if you look at it in terms of tenure matching, things will become clearer. Both of them had their own problems, which needed solutions. And neither of them had a problem for which the solution involved marriage. Ok wait. Geet did have a marriage problem. She wanted to marry Anshuman, and needed to find an efficient way of eloping with him and marrying him. So looking at it from the scope sense, all she needed was someone to guide her in her efforts to do the same.

Aditya’s problems, too, weren’t something for which marriage was an obvious solution. He had put extreme NED at work, and was on the verge of killing himself. All he needed was someone to guide him out of NED. Someone to show him that life can be beautiful, and happy, and that he shouldn’t take any extreme steps.

Looking at the movie from this context, it is clear that marriage between Geet and Aditya wasn’t warranted. Ok it might have been a “no-so-bad extension” but it wasn’t required. It wasn’t a solution that fit in any way with the problems that they were facing in their lives. Which is why the ending stuck out like a sore thumb (and that excess song-and-dance and loudness and all that contributed in no measure) .

Ok now I realize that I shouldn’t be analysing Bollywood movies from a logical standpoint. but still…