from where to where

I spent the whole day watching back to back episodes of Gilmore Girls and then youtubed a Tamil film from the 80's. The latter experience was really phenomenal, I was drowning in the glory of midi skirts, baggy jeans and genius Ilayaraja melodies peppered unnecessarily with synth music. I like this movie, I like the drama, I like the fact that Karthik and Prabhu are so young and (eep) so hot, I like that Nirosha's splashing about in her polka dotted swimsuit, nowhere close to a size zero and totally kicking Amrita Arora's or any other pro-anorexia-bimbette-of-the-day's ass. I like to see that the picturization of 'Hey, goodbye nanba' and 'Snehithane' are just new and improved versions of the originals pictured here. I like Amala's konjified Tamil, so much like Trisha's from Ayutha Ezhuthu (such a copycat). The comic track is quite out of place and pissing off, but I love this movie for how young it is and how much energy is in it and how some 20 years later, there are reflections of my own world in a movie that was made when I was two.

I like watching movies that I used to watch as a kid. It brings back the days from many years ago, when they were watched for the first time, the reigning fantasies that were playing in my head, and the feel of the weather on that day. I especially like watching old Tamil and Malayalam movies because it instantly takes me back home. I can smell the slightly tangy sweetness of ripe rastali bananas mingling with smoky incense of the the agarbathis pricked on them, I can feel the perfect warmth of summer in Coimbatore and the anticipation of cousins. Those are my summer memories. Then of winter, that too, of heaviness in the air, of my brother's royal blue sweater from London that he outgrew in a year but I fit into till I turned 13. I remember feeling a little sad when it was cold, it always felt like death, I remember the sound of our room-heater that would whirr constantly in the night and keep me up, thinking about things beyond the scope of a little girl, things that would make me pray and pray that my parents would never die.

I was a very sterotypical little girl, not the cool kind of girl like Ellie in Up! I liked pink and frills and my ultimate dream was to be able to wear cut-shoes with heels and make-up. My favorite film/story was Alice in wonderland and it was only because of Alice that I allowed subjecting myself the heinous injustice of buckled shoes. My child hood ambition was to be a teacher, who would come to school in midi skirt and frilly white blouse, cut shoes with heels and make-up, like Sabitha teacher, who was my idol. I was determined to vaguely resemble Juhi Chawla once I reached her then age, go to school, pick up my colored chalk, draw two red and four blue lines on the black board and teach my class to write the alphabet. And I hated boys my age, because they were dirty and ate snot, sometimes didnt listen to the teacher (omg!) and liked to hit me with bits of paper launched using rubber-band catapults (extremely painful). Still, the concept of single-sex schools were unknown to me and I was really looking forward to being authorized to slap the palms of little boys with a wooden ruler. (yuck, wat a perv last line). Such ruthless ambition.

Anyway, this is the effect movies that were new when I was small have on me. The people I was before I wound up here, in my living room where I am writing all this, come and sit beside me on the sand colored couch. They drag along with them a young Juhi Chawla, Sabitha teacher, they smell of mangoes and bananas and rain on earth and incense, an entire double bed on which me and my bro are sandwiched between my parents, while a heater from 1989 blows out hot air across 20 years. Its a little heart wrenching, but I believe its healthy, because I'm reminded that I am as young as I wanted to be when I was just sitting there with my dolls and waiting and waiting to bleddy grow up. Soon, I will be out of fashion too, just like my bangs ( with reference to hair), like empire line blouses and most of the music I listen to (barring A.R Rahman, which will just ripen into vintage). It reminds me to have a good time and expect a little bit of melodrama and not kick myself for not being wise because I wasn't aiming for wise, I was aiming for a really pretty picture. Yes, boo hoo, now I must deal with it, again, everything looks perfect from far away or from long ago.

It also reminds me, I shouldnt live in the past like I do in my spare time these days, I've heard thats just an inevitable spiral towards old age.