Long, long ago, I remember my grandfather grumbling: “Today’s movies are meaningless, they only show ‘dhishum dhishum’.” A die-hard fan of Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand and Pradeep Kumar’s style of romance, he used to find the emerging film culture of the 1980s, led by the likes of Amitabh Bachchan and Shatrughan Sinha, distasteful.
His disparagement of those action thrillers, stemming from the then political unrest with several actors playing the victimised working-class hero fighting corruption were not good enough to impress an old hat like him who used to savour social dramas and serene love stories like ‘Andaaz’, ‘Tarana’, ‘Madhumati‘, ‘Patita’ and ‘Munimji’ made me cringe.
He felt those films offered a rather myopic view of contemporary youth and would discourage us from watching them.
At that time I had somewhat different views on the movies, but I could relate to his views when I went to catch ‘2 States‘, the big screen adaptation of Chetan Bhagat’s novel of the same name, a delightful depiction of how cultural differences pose a threat to a Punjabi boy and a Tamilian girl’s love life and marriage plans and how skillfully and maturely the duo handle the situation.
Despite being familiar with the story, which I read when Bhagat’s literary work hit the shelves in 2009, and enjoyed the book not for its romantic escapades, but for the way the problems were treated and meted in the book, I was pleased with its celluloid presentation too.
It’s heartening! Read more on msn.
Romance, the '2 States' way
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