Monday, August 22, 2011

Jaane Tu...Ya Jaane Na Moment

Few days back, the movie Jaane Tu...Ya Jaane Na was coming on one of the TV channels. As I did not have anything really interesting on hand at the moment, watching the movie seemed a good idea.


I have an idea that most people in India, including me, have seen the movie at least once. Most people have a rough idea of  the story. I am not going to talk about it. Neither am I a critic to discuss the movie at length.


But somewhere in the movie occurs a scene that made me think, maybe even feel.


Now, if you have seen the movie, you may remember the scene where the character of the brother, played amazingly by Prateik Babbar, have a talk with his sister, the bubbly Genelia D'Souza, about her choice of a life partner. You may remember it, solely for the fact that it is like the Now-I-realize moment for Genelia's character. (As an aside-cum-confession, I don't remember clearly the names of the characters portrayed, but I think Genelia's was called Meow.)


But within the Now-I-realize moment, there was a small bit that struck me this time around.


During the conversation, Prateik almost casually makes a half comment, that puts his whole character into a deeper background. Till that moment, he is an eccentric character, taunting his sister's friends, keeping a mouse for a pet. Almost absurd.


And the few words he says now: my sister...who was my best friend...


Suddenly, he is no longer such an absurd existence. He is a brother who misses his sister. And because he misses her, he has made his room his fortress, not venturing out too much. And whenever he misses her too much, he comes out, taunts his sister's friends, so, that his sister would notice him, even though with anger. In a slightly mad way, he was just trying to spend a bit of time with his sister, who has moved away with her friends, away from him.


It could be a comment made by most brothers, who misses their sisters-who have grown and moved into their friends. Sisters, in a most elemental way, are a part of a brother's life: with their sharing, caring, simple demands, and in countless different ways.
But with growing, they completely move away. Friends become such an important part of their life. Things change. Brothers feel abandoned. But they cannot say that either. They too make their own escapes, in other ways.


Like Prateik's character, who just rolls up into his shell of a room, coming out only when the missing becomes unbearable. He has accepted it as inevitable. But at the same time he knows his sister so well, that he is the only one who understands her heart, and knows whom she really loves.


But does the character says all this? No. He uses only six simple words: my sister...who was my best friend... And with those six simple words, the whole character comes into a different light altogether. All his eccentricities becomes meaningful. He's just a brother missing his sister. Each of his activity till then becomes suffused by that meaning. Now, I don't want to go ahead and make an assertion that Genelia's character was also supposed to make the same realization, and she did. But I just could not help hoping that she did, that she got the meaning of her brother's half said, yet most telling confession in the whole of the movie. For me, that became the most important slice of an otherwise another routine love story. 


But the most amazing thing about that scene is its simplicity and effectiveness. So much telling, with so few words - six to be precise.


That's story telling.

They Don't Fit in the Pocket

I must have been in Class 7 when I read my first Hindi pulp fiction. It was a novel named  Sile Huye Honth  (Sewn Lips). The hero of the...