I am single-screen and the husband is multiplex. Therein lies the biggest difference in our marriage. I am brazen, say-it-like-it-is, loud, with jagged edges; he is poised, politically correct and the epitome of well-mannered. We still work for each other, and are fairly self-deprecating, so the marriage works. But our differences come to the fore whenever a Dabangg happens.
So while I had to be me and watch Dabangg in a single-screen theatre, because the dabangg in me thinks that’s the only way to do it, the husband chooses to go the multiplex way, because there’s only so much of the real world he can take. Needless to say, I end up watching it twice, once for me and once for him.
I am shocked by the second viewing, to say the least. It is like watching a totally different film. Salman makes an entry. Nothing happens. Salman delivers his first line. No response. Salman takes off his shirt. Nothing. No one gets the brazenness of the writing, forget the nuances.
Save one senior citizen who laughed at my favourite line (about the hero punching so many holes in the villain that he wouldn’t be able to tell his orifices apart), it could well be that everyone in the theatre was in a coma. Is this what happens when you pay as much for your popcorn as for your ticket? I wonder.
Coupling of today is a bit like watching a movie in a multiplex. Good on paper, perhaps good for the economy, but lacking in soul. On the other hand, people are coupling all the time, and I have seen several couples in the recent past— some cosmetic, some real, some transient — but rarely have I seen real passion, shared laughs, chemistry, repartee and a I-wish-that-could-be-us feeling. Where are the imperfections, where are the rough edges, where are the real people being their real selves?
{{/usCountry}}Coupling of today is a bit like watching a movie in a multiplex. Good on paper, perhaps good for the economy, but lacking in soul. On the other hand, people are coupling all the time, and I have seen several couples in the recent past— some cosmetic, some real, some transient — but rarely have I seen real passion, shared laughs, chemistry, repartee and a I-wish-that-could-be-us feeling. Where are the imperfections, where are the rough edges, where are the real people being their real selves?
{{/usCountry}}Perhaps everything is camouflaged by the muted lighting and disinfectedness of the places people hang out in (have you noticed how few homes you have been into lately?) and no one ever asks anything, so nothing needs to be revealed.
Maybe they are just reading too many self-help books and learning to be guarded, or maybe, like multiplexes, they have all lost their patina of the real stuff, the stuff that tells them apart.
Maybe I am just meeting the wrong people. Because I don’t get how marriages can be ended by deleting your spouse from your friends list and then announcing in your Facebook status that it is the end of the road?
Or how can one fall out-of-love with someone you clearly married in your senses? Or how can relationships be terminated by sending a group SMS that you have, after all, chosen to remain friends? But then, I am so single-screen, I will never get it.
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