Category: 2017

Love

Published on by Harpreet Chhachhia2 Comments

I was listening to an old Hindi song. It was Meera telling Krishna that, in essence, he loved only Radha, and yet people blame her for loving him – unrequitedly.

श्याम तेरी बंसी पुकारे राधा नाम
लोग करे मीरा को यूँ ही बदनाम

To which he replies:

सावरे की बंसी को बजने से कम
राधा का भी श्याम वो तो मीयर्रा का भी श्याम

This is an element of love I think that very few people realise. Apparently, it’s something that I happened to learn after forty years of living and loving. Though I knew I was the kind of person who never “fell out of love”. Truthfully, I believe if someone can do that he or she wasn’t in love in the first place.

Romantically, in my life thus far, I have been in three relationships. And I still love all three men. How is that possible? Easy. Each person is an individual. Each person has his own unique and utterly different character. I loved M because of his passion, his voice, his energy, he was my first love. I remember the first time we kissed. I remember the times we shared. I remember his smile, his handwriting, his hair. So the love I have for him is unique, it was custom made for him. It manifested out of me, because of him.

When he left me, I was devastated. I was bereft. I felt as if a part of me was wrenched away. The feeling of loss surrounded me for over years… but I never stopped loving him. I couldn’t even think of him negatively. He had broken my heart, but ironically, the love in it never broke.

The same happened the second time I fell in love… Anders was a Dane. A quintessential dream come true. Blue eyes, strawberry blond, taller than I, mature and calm. An architect. The first movie we saw together was The Horse Whisperer, in Sterling. I remember the first time we kissed, too, we were both actually trembling. The way he made me feel was so different from the way M had made me feel.

At that point in time, at the age of twenty-three, I couldn’t really tell the difference in what I felt. I believed love was love, and like Meera, I would be left bereft. Of course, he loved just me, and truly and deeply – in all the ways love songs would describe it. But after M, I didn’t trust love and, since he was from abroad, I thought that this relationship would meet with the same fate. However, he did return from Denmark. He bought me the most beautiful Christmas tree, all the way from there, because he knew how much I love celebrating Christmas. He had come to spend the holidays with me, and this time it was I who broke a heart.

I was protecting myself, and I was trying to be the mature one. I didn’t think that it would work out because of geography and because of cultural differences. He was willing to try, and I was afraid to. I didn’t realise then that the way he made me feel only he could, and that he was he and not M. I remember his tears, and I remember holding his face against my neck, my hands in his hair, and wondering how I could do that. But I did. Not because I did not love him, but because I was afraid that this love would end the same way the last one did. That was my terrible error. Our relationship ended, but I have not stopped loving him.

When I fell for a guy seven years my junior, I was just beginning to give up on preconceived notions on how love should be. Of course, at twenty-five, I was jealous, possessive and had set views on how love should form its nature. I didn’t realise then that each love forms its own path when two individuals walk it. I tried for many years to make Anand see love through my perspective. I couldn’t understand that romance had nothing to do with love. Passion had nothing to do with love. Jealousy had nothing to do with love. Possession had nothing to do with love.

When he cheated on me thirteen years later, I was not as upset about the physical tearing but about the fact that he couldn’t tell me what was going on with him. By then I had evolved enough to know the difference between the hurt felt post the breaking of trust as opposed to him having sex with another man. So we made a compromise – amongst the hundreds already done – and moved on with love in tow.

Through my teens, and my twenties, I tried incorporating all that I had read and seen in my relationships. There are knights in shining armours, but not always riding horses, or wearing armours. There are love confessions on tall buildings, but those can happen in a quiet bedroom as well. There are beautiful sunsets and hands intertwined in silhouettes but the intertwining can happen on a casual walk to an ice cream shop. I didn’t realise all of this earlier, and I would be upset.

I have learnt that I cannot mold another person to love me in the way he is not capable. But in no way does that mean he doesn’t love me. Love cannot be gauged. It can only be felt.

Over the years, I have come across many men. I related to them over poetry, music, movies, families, events, spaces and thoughts. I realise now that each of them spoke to a side of me that no one else could. Each of them cajoled and satisfied a part of my heart that had hitherto been neglected. In my own way then, I loved and love so many who came across my path. And none of this love ever tampered with the love that already existed in different spaces of my heart.

This is what I understand now. Love isn’t restrictive. It is surely exclusive, but it forms a new facet to include a new exclusion. Who says that love happens once? It happens all the time. That’s the best part of it. It is like this ever expanding light, it reaches out and forms new lights, like some mythic orbit of newly created stars. Each star shining with its own light, special and its very own.

La La Land

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

I get why they called it La La Land. I’ve been reading about this land since my teens… when Gore Vidal, Jackie Collins and Joan Collins were some of the various authors whose works I devoured. I have read Joyce Carol Oates, Huxley and Fitzgerald in my college years. I have been a fan of movies since I could walk. I have been raised in Mumbai, a city that has the similar prestige of fulfilling dreams of fame. I have seen Abhimaan, the theme of which was applicable to La La Land, but in a more rustic way… though the music of the former completely outshines the latter – in my opinion.

But then I could talk about the countless other musicals that I think overshadowed La La Land. Singing in the Rain, The Wizard of Oz, The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady! Or if you must remove ourselves from the times when musicals were fantastic then I shall mention Grease, Moulin Rouge, Mamma Mia and Chicago!

I agree that the dynamics here are slightly different – we want grittier stuff, we want a sad ending, we want (do we?) a series of fade ins and outs, we want more reality, we want more angst – but don’t we also want good dancing, good lyrics, good – er, singing? I must say, I expected more. I expected good songs, dammit. It did divert from other musicals when the predominant focus of the movie was just these two characters, the only other character I remember other than the main leads, is the hero’s sister. So that in itself sets the tone apart from almost all other musicals.

I will point out the good stuff. Emma Stone couldn’t sing – but man, that woman can act! She is dynamic and her face is fluid with emotion. She stole my breath away in quite a few scenes, all of them when she is rife with struggle. She needs an accolade, she did but then so did Ryan Gosling. That brings me to him: He played the piano damn well, in fact, he learned how to make love to the black and white keys in a few months, commendable indeed! But acting? His face is pretty and wooden. So then I keep looking to his eyes then for some glimpse of emotion, but not only is his face stone but his eyes are blank. They had to light up his eyes in the end to get some life in them… He is just dispassionate – and he got an award?

The title track: the lyrics are flat, but the melody is breathtaking. It sits with you. You look forward to hearing it even in the background score. The song that I like (lyrics and music – not the singing, mind) is Audition (The Fools Who Dream). The lyrics are beautiful, it has the quality of I Dreamed a Dream, and Anne Hathaway’s is not the best rendition, yet still so moving… ah well. Audition rests as my favoured song from the movie.

But I would really like to ask, why make it into a musical? If you have a sterling actress and a reasonable plot why transform the genre? She is an actress and he is a pianist. We see episodes of her screen tests (magnificent) and we see episodes of him playing the piano. So shouldn’t that have been enough to lay foundation to character and plot?

Maybe it is a musical because of the last few minutes of the movie, when the narrative spins into a Ginger Rogers – Fred Astaire take on how the movie could have been, and when it actually catapaults you into the space where the movie breathes into a musical personality. It’s cut short however. Maybe then they should have just forgotten about making it into a musical – if it is about music, then it should have worked with predominant jazz, that called to Mia in the first place. Make it about his music and not make it into a musical! But then it’s not just about his music – so frankly, let me push the buck and say making it a musical seems misogynistic.

I admit that life has its idiosyncrasies, how people drift, how love and careers seldom make good bedfellows, but all of this could have been done better. Hell, it has been done better. The movie actually makes a little more sense when I see it from a different angle, it’s never about these two characters and their love for each other, it is about these two characters and their love for their careers and how these two enable that to happen in the course of their few months together. The best scene in the movie (no! it wasn’t them dancing in the “stars”) was the argument that they have at the dinner table, when they both tell each other that their dreams are what makes them tick, and the fact that they shouldn’t be given up for love is left hanging like a guillotine.

So the movie makes us understand that the Real and the Romantic do not mix, which is the truth. In reality, we are all really lousy singers. Passion lasts for about a year. You have to go through heartbreak to be successful. Dreams can be found, if dancing among the stars is forsaken, and there you have the paradox of the movie. No dancing together in the city of figurative, twinkling stars but performing in the city of worldly, rich stars

Also, if you note, she has a boyfriend whom she leaves for Seb, after she essentially hears him play the first time – I mean, who doesn’t have a thing for a talented, tortured musician? Okay, that’s a whole different argument. But coming back to my point, she hears him play when she is married in the end, so chances are she may just go back to him later – hopefully, there isn’t a sequel then. And if there is, please don’t let it be a musical!

(And I still didn’t understand why they didn’t get better lyricists for the movie?)

Meryl Streep

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

It is seldom that a speech made by a Hollywood Celebrity makes me sit up and applaud. The last time I did that was when Christopher Reeve gave a speech at the Oscars in 1996. I have liked Meryl Streep, I have never been an immense fan, tonight it was a pleasure to hear her speak after she received the Cecille B DeMille award for her contribution to cinema. And she surely has. Through the years, she has amassed a body of work that few actresses can boast of.

Over time, I have felt a strange apathy seeping into me. I have lost faith in humanity, more or less. The ideals that I grew up with, from the works of authors and poets and artists and visionaries and dreamers with much larger sensibilities than the world could hope to replicate, ingrained in me a sense of balance that I find shaken by the times we live in. The people I grew up with and have loved seem to have their moral compasses aligned opposed to mine and I find that it is difficult to be meaningful in a world that is now a strange dystopia.

I keep thinking of Yeats’ The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

I don’t want to quote the entire poem, it leaves me with an eerie feeling of premonition and I shudder. But tonight, I heard Streep’s speech and she spoke so beautifully that I just had to keep a transcript of it here. So without further ado, here it is:

Please sit down. Thank you. I love you all. You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve lost my voice in screaming and lamentation this weekend. And I have lost my mind sometime earlier this year, so I have to read.

Thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press. Just to pick up on what Hugh Laurie said: You and all of us in this room really belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it: Hollywood, foreigners and the press.

But who are we, and what is Hollywood anyway? It’s just a bunch of people from other places. I was born and raised and educated in the public schools of New Jersey. Viola was born in a sharecropper’s cabin in South Carolina, came up in Central Falls, Rhode Island; Sarah Paulson was born in Florida, raised by a single mom in Brooklyn. Sarah Jessica Parker was one of seven or eight kids in Ohio. Amy Adams was born in Vicenza, Italy. And Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem. Where are their birth certificates? And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in London — no, in Ireland I do believe, and she’s here nominated for playing a girl in small-town Virginia.
Ryan Gosling, like all of the nicest people, is Canadian, and Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, and is here playing an Indian raised in Tasmania. So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. And if we kick them all out you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.

They gave me three seconds to say this, so: An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us, and let you feel what that feels like. And there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that. Breathtaking, compassionate work.

But there was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good; there was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh, and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out of my head, because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose. O.K., go on with it.

O.K., this brings me to the press. We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call him on the carpet for every outrage. That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in the Constitution. So I only ask the famously well-heeled Hollywood Foreign Press and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists, because we’re gonna need them going forward, and they’ll need us to safeguard the truth.

One more thing: Once, when I was standing around on the set one day, whining about something — you know we were gonna work through supper or the long hours or whatever, Tommy Lee Jones said to me, “Isn’t it such a privilege, Meryl, just to be an actor?” Yeah, it is, and we have to remind each other of the privilege and the responsibility of the act of empathy. We should all be proud of the work Hollywood honors here tonight.
As my friend, the dear departed Princess Leia, said to me once, take your broken heart, make it into art.