Reality Bites...

Well, there are good movies and bad movies, and then there are tear-jerkers. The last category is a mish-mash of different kinds of films, very different from one another, but similar in their ability to reduce me to a red-nosed, five year old. So yes, I have watched Stepmom, When Harry Met Sally, Father of the Bride, Dil To Pagal Hai, Life in a Metro, Taare Zameen Par, so on so forth and each time I have ended up with a full bucket, albeit imaginary…

But the movie which had turned me into this hopelessly hopeless romantic was Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (KKHH). Released when I was still in school, a teenager eager to fall in love easily, it made a deep impact as I slipped naturally in the role of Anjali Sharma (Kajol at her remarkable best). She played basketball, I played badminton/kabaddi, she sucked at putting on make-up, I had a horrendous dressing sense, she fell in love with her best friend, my best friend left the country. In the next ten years, I have seen the movie n number of times, and each time I have cried like the same 5 year old…

I happened to watch it again on Sunday, and this time I watched it from a matured feminist point of view, unlike the starry-eyed teenager hoping for a fairy tale ending. This time I identified with Anjali Sharma, not the college-going tomboy but the sari-clad engaged woman who is still trying to come to terms with a life with the perfect guy who makes her the centre of his world, for whom she is the only woman and is willing to be with her in spite of knowing that she doesn’t care about him the way he does for her. Instead she goes back to her college crush, the guy who broke her heart, for whom she was always the second choice, i.e. the “imperfect” man who still wielded as much power on her as he did ages back. Yes, it’s a fairy tale ending, yes, she finally gets the man of her dreams, yes she finds happiness after years of waiting, and yes, the audience is definitely happy! But the nagging question that still bothers you is, “Isn’t she a pushover? Why would she go back to someone who rejected her in the first place? And what if Tina (Rani Mukherjee) was still alive?” I hate to admit it, but if I were in her place, I would have done the same thing, but unfortunately, in real life, things aren’t quite so convenient. Tina would have never died in the first place, Rahul (Shahrukh Khan) would have lived happily ever after with the woman he really fell in love with, and as for Anjali Sharma, she would have disappeared into a mundane existence and an ordinary marriage, feeding on her memories like so many other women.