Main Hoon Na!

I've been on a Bollywood high the past couple of days. Been catching up on my fillum quota left right and centre. Saw Veer Zaara when I was sick. Quite boring and asinine for the most part....the old man is really losing it, I think and turning into Subhash Ghai, ewwwww...although there were moments, and fleeting ones though, where the magic shone through. Amitabh and Hema, certain Punjab scenes, and I must confess, I actually wept through Shah Rukh's courtroom monologue. Then I simply had to see Masti after reading Rohington Mistry's Family Matters. No connection as such - but Mistry's prose is so bleak (it's beautiful, don't get me wrong - he's one of my favourite writers) that I had to go to the other end of the spectrum to compensate. And what paisa vasool yaars! What a movie. Despite the homophobia, despite the shocking sexism, despite the truly outrageous dialogues, despite the preposterousness of it all... I really, really, really enjoyed Masti - the sheer over the top, breezy, vulgarity of it all was just too refreshing. :-) And then today, in a class I taught to first year Comparative Media Studies graduate students at MIT, we watched Main Hoon Na, and I witnessed yet again, the Bollywood magic come alive for a hitherto unexposed group. The students were rocking and rolling in their seats, clapping and hooting, and for a moment, I thought I was back in Bombay, in the stalls of a theatre... except that the audience today was American, Belgian, German and Chinese... It had been a tiring day for all of us - I had taken another class in the afternoon with the same batch of students - and most of them, including me, had been on campus for more than 10 hours. But after the film wound up, a few minutes past 10, we were all enchantingly energized, revitalized and joy-filled. What a feeling. Truly precious.... the magic of cinema lives on.