Engravings on the sands of time

As usual, after a hectic day, rather night at the news desk, I woke up to TV at 2 am and started surfing so that I can get bored enough to sleep. Somewhere in between, I saw the inimitable Sukumaran, a new teacher at a college, telling the girl-students in his unmistakeably masculine, magnetic timbre that he would have started a marriage bureau if he didn't land this job to marry them off! Of course, he was paying back in kind to the girls who were trying to tease him. I was hooked.

The film was 'Shalini Ente Koottukari', written by Padmarajan and directed by Mohan. As I sat back and watched the faded print, I felt like seeing something far away, unfamiliar and exotic. It was not the storyline ( a melancholic Shobha getting afflicted with cancer and succumbing to the inevitable end after a successful surgery), not the breathtaking performance by Sobha, Jalaja and Sukumaran, not the mushy lyrics dipped in sentimentality and fake romanticism, not the evergreen melodies of Devarajan in the silk and gold voice of Yesudas, ...

Don't think I am stretching the suspense too long, and in the process fooling you. It is the feel the film provides, that of a Kerala which was so near, yet so far away. The people, their mindsets, their hopes, their fears, their relationships, their attitudes, their dress...It seemed as though I was travelling back in time to a far far away land, where by some coincidence, the people there looked somewhat similar to us. Nothing more.To think that only a quarter of a century has wrought such massive changes in our land and ourselves! Slim college girls ( Without the help of multi-gym, dieting, aerobics and art of living!) draped in voile sarees with big prints, boys sporting huge bell-bottoms and huge collars resembling goat-ears and flowing down mustaches, campuses thrilled to hear the rumble of a rare Rajdoot and Lambretta thundering past, boys declaring their love to girls as though they are about to die with the effort, and girls, though very much interested in the 'offer', fearful of acknowledging the same. Charming hypocrisy. But, all that idyllic, Platonic love seems so out of place and time now.

And the relationships. The one between the friends Sobha and Jalaja beautiful and empathetic and was well appreciated then. If such a film comes out now, the critics would look under to see whether something more (physical) is there in their love for each other. The terror with which the siblings Sobha and Venu view their father would look exaggerated and even comic for the new generation, especially for those who have seen films like 'Ishtam' wherein a mock-serious Dileep admonishes his father Nedumudi Venu for his pranks.

What a sea change the landscapes have undergone! The open spaces, the greenery, the cool shades and the sights and sounds that made our land so special is all there. When compared to that, the concrete jungles we and the flicks of our times inhabit, inspite of the mad rush of people and traffic, seem so desolalate and hollow.

Cinema, as a medium of the young, captures them in all their shades. The sorrows of the jobless educated as depicted by Venu Nagavalli may seem too unreal and sentimental for the youngsters of this generation who get employment before they come out of college. The number of 'divine' loves shattered on the rock of unemployment then! God only knows how big a number that can be.

To think of it, every movie, or any form of documentation, whatever may be its merit or quality, preserves something of the essence of the times. Isn't that so?