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Saturday, June 15, 2013 Gopalkrishna Gandhi June 14, 2013 First Published: 22:53 IST(14/6/2013) Last Updated: 23:02 IST(14/6/2013) Print
6/15/2013 4:51 PM
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I had not heard of the film actress who took her life in Juhu last week, which of course shows my level of disconnect with the times. But the circumstances narrated by her in her letter struck me as extraordinary. They were more than a window into her agonised mind. They were a commentary on the state of that thing which used to be called love. The young man arrested for abetment by torture could, if he had ever heard Yesterday re-play McCartneys song in his brain. As could the cricketer charged with match-fixing, the entrepreneur who drove his Merc over persons sleeping on a Chennai pavement, or the MP accused (I hope to be exonerated) in the coal-bloc allocation all within a month of each other, all very young men. I cannot but think of another young man here, said, in fact, to be a minor, an accused in what is now scalded into public memory as the December 16 gang rape victim. All the case-types that I have mentioned represent what may be called opportunisms. Throws of a giddy dice for a reckless thrill in getting something beyond ones deserving of it, disfiguring that very thing with a swelling of desire into greed, of greed into blind lust and criminality. Where is the space in this chain of avarice for what McCartney sings of and Sahir Ludhianvi writes about? The Beatles lived complex, unhappy lives. Their band and their marriages broke up. But, like the great lyricists who turned our cinema into human experiences, when they sang, they were thinking of, feeling for, searing their souls and those of their listeners for, tender feelings, delicate emotions, for love and despair and loneliness. They could be stunned by loss, betrayal and heart-break because there was a trust to lose, a love to be betrayed, a bond to be snapped. Today, when relationships are essentially contractual, their purposes opportunistic, their tenures dependent wholly on delivery, how can they possibly lead to art? The tragic lives of Guru Dutt and Geeta Dutt tracked the sadness of their films. They too were utterly guileless as human beings. They died over things Bollywood would not shed an onion tear for. Were it not for Gulzar and Javed Akhtar, Hindi cinema would have been unrelievedly barren of feeling. But popular art cannot be different from its times. What we are, our music, cinema, books are. I cannot remember when I last heard a song in our cinema that actually moved me, did something to my within. Devika Rani, Suraiya, Meena Kumari, Madhubala, Nargis, Nutan, Suchitra Sen, Guru Dutt, Dilip Kumar, Raj Kumar, Sanjeev Kumar are not described as character actors for nothing. Their successors on the screen, with very few exceptions, look mass produced actor characters. Perhaps I am being just an old fogey. If our times could be so wonderfully absorbed by Vikram Seths novel, A Suitable Boy, be stirred by a new version of Saratchandras deathless love-story Devdas and be fascinated by the re-told legend of Jodha Akbar, love and romance are not entirely without hope in India. But who can deny that there was something to it, now gone, that makes us so long for yesterday. Gopalkrishna Gandhi is a former administrator, diplomat and governor The views expressed by the author are personal http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print/1076510.aspx Copyright 2013 HT Media Limited. All Rights Reserved.
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6/15/2013 4:51 PM