Cinema and I

For the myriad, cinema is an escape from the normal world. People want to escape from their daily routines, work and family related stress and enjoy the 1.5 to 2.5 hours in a movie theater, which is fine with me. What is not fine is when the same people start to judge a piece of cinema based on their shallow or little knowledge of what goes behind into making it. It’s like a person who knows little or nothing about paintings, trying to pass some verdict on a Picasso piece.

For me, Cinema is art, in its most beautiful form. Cinema is like a painting in motion, with beautiful and sometimes even unheard of sounds; where the characters are not stuck in a time-frame but are moving through different stills to show you a world which never was, and make you believe that what’s going on that 70 mm screen is happening right in front of your eyes.

A good piece of Cinema is like mom’s food. The aftertaste of mom’s food lingers in your mouth for a long time and you never forget the taste of her hand. A great piece of Cinematic art has the power to take you in a different time zone, a great piece cinema can alter cultural dynamics of the society, a great piece of Cinema can inspire science and a great piece of Cinema can change the way you see and think about the world.

I had my first tryst with cinema in 1996 when cable TV came to my hometown. I had watched TV earlier, but cable gave me some sort of moral freedom. First time ever, rent was being to watch TV and someone had to utilize it. Also, dad’s job and business at hand gave me enough time to sneak into TV from time to time. One of the first movies I remember seeing is Rajesh Khanna’s Anand, which still holds highest regards in my heart. Very soon I found out, that Indian cinema is not the only one on this planet when, one fine day, I stumbled on Star Movies while surfing channels.

Those days, English channels were sort of a taboo. It was thought of as a bad influence on growing kids. Censor board too, was much more liberal and not like a moral police as in today’s times. Kissing scenes, killing scenes and smoking scenes were shown in their full glory and you had to be quick with your short range TV remote, so that you can change the channel whenever parents were around, while the characters were about to get intimate.

I enjoyed the late 80’s and early 90’s classics until 2002 when I left home to continue with my higher studies. In Lucknow, I was denied the luxury of a TV, but now, there was no one to stop me from going to theaters. Morning shows were my first love and I had even found some shabby theaters where the balcony seat was as low as Rs 15. I remember watching my first Vin Diesel movie "XXX"  in one such theater.  The name of the movie resembles a porn title but it’s actually a great action movie of that time. Watching Vin jumping out from a car in the middle of the air gave me goosebumps.

Years went by and came 2006, my second year of Engineering at Ghaziabad. Like most of the students, I too, succeeded in befooling my innocent parents to buy me a desktop, as I had a lot of educational stuff to do on that. I am an Electronics & Instrumentation Engineer, so you know I didn’t have any programming to do. Did I forget to mention that I also got an external graphic card installed in there?
Anyways, apart from gaming and listening to music and watching videos, my system was used for one whole sole purpose – Movies.

A computer and infinite access to internet in college hostel opened my windows to world cinema. I also came to know about something called IMDB, which till today, happens to be the Google of movies. I started with Tarantino, Ritchie, Spielberg, Scorsese, Allen, Zemeckis, Hitchcock, Eastwood and Leone to name a few. I then moved on the best actors of all time, then to cinematographers, then the screenplay writers until a time when I started to think, what next?

Through internet, I started reading and noticing about the various international film festivals and movies that were making a big mark there. I also came to understand that language is no barrier for a great piece of cinematic art. Emotions transcend through the barrier of language and you have Subscene dot com and Subtitles dot org to give you a helping hand.

The complete collection of a singer or a musical band is called discography. I am proud to have completed the discography of many cinematic greats of all time. Like in the case of novels, movies too have some taboo. Almost all have read or seen it, but will never confess it. I mean if you have read novels, you must have read Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho and if you ever have watched international movies in the confinement of your hostel rooms, you must have watched Melina and Irreversible. Watching the latter was a soul shaking experience. To see rape enacted in a movie which was no less disturbing or terrifying that it must have been to the victims of this ghastly crime!

Movies are a part of my existence. It’s like a world of 3D emotional experience for me, where I feel the love, happiness, hatred and all sort of other emotions a character undergoes. For during the run-time of a movie, I am the protagonist and the antagonist, I am the male lead and the female interest, I am the right hand of the hero and I am the taxi driver he has a casual chat with and I am also the father of the beautiful heroine and I can feel the emotion while he caresses his daughter’s hair or cover her in his embrace. I am the old guy from the Notebook who loves his wife and I am also the Joker from the Dark Knight who is nothing more than a dog chasing cars.

Even with the most modest of calculations and taking only 9 straight years (since 2006), of watching movies every day, I have watched 9*365 = 3285 movies, which, trust me, is less than actual half of the movies I have watched. Even today, I watch one, everyday.

Everybody hates to and is fearful of dying. One of the things I will miss most in my afterlife would be that piece of 70 MM art which the world calls a motion picture!