Everything I know about love, I learned from Bollywood.
Single
at 28, I’m still waiting for the benefits of my education to kick in.
The average Bollywood heroine falls in love and elopes by 18, so I’ve
got a considerable amount of catching up to do. So far, I’ve had one
serious relationship, a few forgettable, regrettable blind dates and
more arranged marriage setups than I care to remember. Is my Bollywood
“Love Plan” flawed?
When I was a kid, Bollywood movies were composed of revenge dramas
with evil village lords, buxom belles and angry young men dripping
blood and sweat. My adolescence bloomed at the same time Bollywood
shifted its focus from action films to starry-eyed romances with
chocolate-faced heroes and lovely melodious soundtracks. I was hooked
from the start.
My lessons began with a small film called
“Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak” (unromantic translation: From One Doomsday to
The Next), starring the then fresh-faced Aamir Khan. The movie was a
Bollywood reprise of Romeo and Juliet, and the old story of
star-crossed lovers was certainly not an innovation. But to my junior
high sensibilities, the lovers-against-the-world courtship, the tragic
ending and the fact that Aamir was so gosh-darn cute made this film the
Ultimate Love Story with the Ultimate Perfect Man. Throughout my high
school years, Bollywood would churn out one version or another of the
same star-crossed-lovers story complete with three hours of passion and
tragedy with a few songs atop the green hills of Switzerland thrown in
for good measure. For me, romance simply was not romance if you didn’t
survive the tears and hurdles of Act 1 and Act 2 before deserving the
happy ending at the last microsecond of Act 3.
So reality hit
hard and fast with my first relationship in college. Here was a
perfectly nice guy, chocolate-faced like Aamir - but after the initial
gastrointestinal butterflies and loss of appetite, Act 1 quickly
transitioned into a comfortable-as-an-old-shoe relationship. Where were
the obstacles? The tears? The sacrifices? My boyfriend was attentive
and kind, but not once did he stand soaking wet in the rain all night
while my evil parents held me captive in a glass palace. We had all the
freedom dorm life affords and none of the resistance of parental or
societal intrusion.
My Perfect Man also vanished into a Bollywood
cloud as I came face to face with the dispassionate daily lives of real
men: their single-minded obsession with ESPN, their inability to
multitask or multithink, their inexplicable protocol when it comes to
returning phone calls (i.e., whenever it happens to suit them). Every
girl navigating the dating world learns these lessons quickly. But for
me, it was a particularly long and hard fall because I was expecting
not just a guy who returns phone calls, but a guy who stands all night
in the aforementioned rain at the risk of pneumonia and death in order
to win over his lady love.
In recent years, along with me,
Bollywood has changed its tune. The latest incarnation of the Bollywood
love story focuses more on the internal conflicts of relationships and
less on external hurdles. Sure you can fight your folks for the right
to be with each other, but what happens when you get that wish? Films
like “Hum Tum” and “Chalte Chalte” take a more Hollywood approach to
love. They look at issues like divorce and leaving the toilet seat up.
Bollywood, like the rest of us, has wised up to the ways of love.
But
it’s Bollywood after all and like me, it’s always a sucker for
fairy-tale endings. These days my notions of love and romance are
influenced more by “Sex and the City” than by Bollywood, but the dream
hasn’t changed. As Carrie declares in the last episode of “Sex and the
City”: "I’m looking for ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming,
can’t-live-without-each-other love." Passion can happen through a
shared glance over a quiet cup of cappuccino as much as it can happen
wearing a pastel-colored sari on a rolling green hillside. He may not
stand in the rain for me all night, but he may care enough to offer me
his umbrella and go bare-headed himself as hand-in-hand we skip over
puddles toward the subway station.
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