2009, kashyap and ors.

I remember watching Dev.D in Wave cinemas Lucknow exactly five days after I'd turned 18. It was a good movie month/couple of months. On my birthday I had taken friends (?) to see Luck By Chance and had had a good time. But Dev.D was something else. The lush red and green lights, the music, the thrill of emotions, the repulsive alcoholism, the father, the corners around the semi-rural houses, the terrace gaze of Paro, Leni, Leni's cycle, the way she would fold her skirt only to show off a little bit more of her thighs, the eventual falling for the wrong guy, the MMS, the lived realities, the small things paid too much attention to (of course, in a good way) and Dev's assholery which somehow made him look a little more human than most others. I remember feeling a hit I had not experienced before. Dev.D come to think of it now, did to me what Ganga Jamuna, Mother India or perhaps, Pakeezah would've done to my father from whom i guess I inherit this crooky love for cinema. That morning, February 6, I had only eaten a burger at McDonald's and flushed it down with a small coke. Popcorns were in my hands during the movie, but too much engagement in the movie had swallowed any interest in wanting to eat them. After the movie I stepped out with friends to what now seems like a cesspool of a pre-break-up fight with the boyfriend. I n full throttle we had a combustive, exploding verbal argument in the parking lot of the small mall premises. All of his friends were present and backed him up, whereas my friends (?) were nowhere to be smelled even. In a rush I had taken an autorickshaw back to the hostel and locked myself in the swanky bedroom of the university arranged Rail Vihar hostel room. My roommate, I remember had banged on the door copiously, hearing my howl. After a few hours I had found myself seated on the waiting room seat in a hospital nearby. I looked around to find the hostel warden stare me in the face and ask me if i remembered my parents' names. I had tried to speak but kept frothing and falling to the ground. She had not even touched me, but like a semidrugged person on anaesthesia, i remember hearing her say to the doctor/nurse there: "She tried to kill herself". After a long week of sleeping and more frothing and watching parents cry I woke up to life having realised that I had got what was my life's first (and only, till now) epileptic fit. The seizure, my psychiatrist (also a friend, who happens to be an uncle) told me was triggered mainly coz of the neon lights in the movie, plus my tender (?) age of 18 and the fact that I hadnt eaten much since the morning. So, my tryst with first of Kashyap's movies was not really great, albeit too memorable. Then came Gulaal in March of the same year that was seen thrice in the cinemas in a span of 10 days, all of when I had wept, and shuddered and cried, not understanding much of the movie. All of this and so much more comes back to me when i watched Mukkabaaz today, and good news, I did not fall to the floor this time, although there were a lot of waterworks and so much unnerving, urgent rush flowing within. Watching it in the comforting milieu of PVR Anupam, was a cushioning too. The sombre sun outside, and the warmth of a creamy, sugary bad cup of chai with one B&H lights was a good way to begin the day. Having witnessed a little bit more violence, life, alcoholism, deaths and departures in these nine years, I liked the violence in the movie. In the core of the movie lay love and basic human instinct to push as well as protect only as much as pone can. I think of a friend (?) who recently drank herself to death, with whom I had had manic nights with discussions poring at the brims from GOW's Womaniya to actor Vineet Singh to another asshole who I sort of dated briefly, I remember how she was always depressed and lonely and on her nights alone in Lucknow under the safe nose of her parents, in her beautiful Patrakarpuram apartment she would drink by herself and then talk to the turtles and ponds in her garden. She, too, was a lover of love and life and had some issues recognising herself as a lesbian, she scorned at herself too much for loving a girl (who on the night of her death partied in Def Col). She too loved the music of Issaq and she too was a beautiful, serene soul on the periphery.. but today she isnt around, and I know for a fact she would have loved Bahut Hua Samman and Paintra as much as she loved Emosanal Attyachar and Electric Piya and Kala Re.. love and life have a way of slowly dissipating out of us and depleting our senses, but cinema transcends and stays and amalgamates a lot, binding and freeing at the same time...