Ripples on the brain

Last week, when I was browsing randomly I landed on a webpage that listed some of the path-breaking Bollywood movies. “Kaho naa Pyaar Hai” was listed among movies such as “Zanjeer”, “Anamika”, “Bobby” and so on. Though many wouldn’t agree “Kaho naa…” to be bracketted in the same category as the other aclaimed ones, this made me go back to my undergraduation days when two movies, that I feel, were all-time hits only because of my hostel folks.

The first is a Tamil movie, “Kathalukku Mariyadhai“. This one was released when I was in the first year of my college. We had a rule in the first year hostel that prior permission needed to be obtained from the warden before leaving the college campus for any reason. Though many times, students used to come up with apparently genuine reasons, there could never be any reason to leave the campus at 8pm and come back at 2 in the night, other than going for a late night show (”II show”, as it is called). So, instead of finding ways to convince the warden, our guys did something different. My college was situated in a hilly region and didn’t have a boundary wall everywhere. My hostel itself was covered by a hastily built fence. Our students created a way through it and called it “The Royal Path“. This path led to a bushy, rocky and dark terrain that had to be crossed before we reached a bus-stop that was a couple of kilometers away from ours. The modus operandi was to finish the dinner and when the security took his dinner, run in batches though the path. Make sure you have a jacket and a cap to cover yourself, so that even when the security spots you you can keep running till the darkness takes over and the security cannot identify you even if he runs behind you. The release of Kathukku… was the first time the path was to be tested officially. After dinner, we all saw from our windows, our enterprising class mates (around 25-30 of them) crossing the Royal Path to glory (”This is a small step for a man…”). They came at around 2am and woke up all of us to tell its story.

“Machan, wonderful film da”.”The director has shown each and every step in the development of love and the lead pair has acted very well”.”The hero doesn’t even touch the heroine till the end”. Though the last one sounds silly, this had an impact in the Tamil audience. In the week that followed, my whole hostel saw the movie atleast twice over and the movie was a big hit. It was released like any other normal movie on an normal friday (friday is when most Tamil movies are released, and big banner movies in Tamil are always released on Pongal, Diwali or Tamil New Year’s day). Vijay wasn’t a great hero then - he’d acted in some inconsequential movies - and I’m sure the whole film unit didn’t have any great expectations on it. It proved to be a big hit, the songs of Illayarajaa were the most hummed ones in my hostel.

The second movie was “Kaho naa Pyaar Hai“. I’d seen the trailers of this movies (among hundreds that are shown in every other Hindi channel) and thought it to be some ordinary movie with new comers (new faces were tried out in every movie released at that time). I watched the movie on first week of its release. Though, there was no initial hype for that movie, I could see that people liked something about it. The songs were a hit (the songs have to be a hit in Hindi, if the films have to do well. But giving hit songs in Hindi is not very difficult - make sure the songs start with chorus “aaaaaaaaaaaah” or “lalalalalala…”), Hrithik’s dance was an advantage and Amisha did well for an new comer. Sure enough this movie was an all-time hit too;two new faces, a sinking director and an unknown music director were catapulted to glory.

There were other movies whose success or failure I could predict based on the response of movie buffs from my hostel (like “Minnale“, where the song “Vaseegara..” became so famous after the audio-release that there were high expectations, but they fell flat on the face when picturization was pretty ordinary; that movie didn’t perform as well as expected, or like “Mugavari“, which the guys felt was very good, but had a climax had something that they couldn’t digest-the lead in the movie wanted to be a music-director, loved a girl, but had a family with an ailing brother that he had to support. In the climax he was shown as walking to the office with his suit-case depicting that he chose the third one and was prepared to wait for the first two till he earned some money; it so happened that, that was reaction every where in Tamil Nadu and the director changed the climax, showing that the hero achieved everything he wanted - the heroine, music director’s job and through it lot of money for the family!!!), but the first two movies are the ones that keep coming back to my mind for the sheer hype that they created in my hostel.