that girl with the mojri

ridiculous to miss a serial so much, yet i just do. too long without this high.

she was lovely (we were chatting about khushi on the thread). i resisted watching ipk for months because i did not, could not believe a hindi serial could have anything of real excitement in it... i was not being a snob, till then no serial of these days had really appealed even those with decent stories.

i used to lie on my bed with my back to the tv while things carried on giving me a sense of india... i needed that after many years away... 

also i was resisting barun.

as hard as i could.

huh some silly boy, so what i get that funny feeling every time i see him... something about him says my mind... but really he's just a useless serial hero... who does he think he is... as you can tell maine bahut koshish ki...

i remember one afternoon i turned around and there on the screen was this crazy looking girl with tight choti, tight weird pompom infested churidar, bizarre colours, and mojri and jhola, talking 3456734 to the dozen, and i said uff another ridiculous serial heroine, how crazy looking is she, what's with the costume...

but i kept watching.

she was such a delight.

naturally truly strange. a real girl, with all sorts of thoughts and things, and a different turn of phrase, view of life.
in fact, in 80, just before the hot arm twisting, her speech on marriage... never have i ever heard such a beautiful defence of marriage, such a real heartfelt understanding... sanaya took her dialogues and made them real feelings of a young girl with innocence, strength, genuine cookiness, lots of guts and plenty happy jhalli. a character who became a person with her.

the loss of this girl hurts. yes the make up is heavier... an accent on prettifying... such a reducing of a genuinely funky person, her light lipstick, her tiny jhumkas matching, her teda choti, her khushi from within, as pagal par cute as her aankhen her baal, her (imagine break in voice) smile. above all, her mind and its crazy connections, its gentle sweet faith in life, its light flowing touch that healed, its refusal to take it lying down, so ingrained that when it showed it felt normal, not like some writers had written her character.

(the other day, my husband noticed a scene from another serial by chance while i surfed, he said, oh they are trying to make her do a khushi... this is a man who did not watch ipk... just a few early episodes and yes the august 1 fight.)
post the decision to marry again, the look went even more strange. her dialogues became duller, she had true sanka, not shrill voiced ott, who forgot that?

but we shall always have the khushi we love right up to the wedding... dm is much thanked for that.

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.........

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this business of love

just wanted to say something about this business of pyaar.



i know everyone wants it to be politically right, done and shown a certain way, we see shows that seem to present the "right" way of loving... and definitely a man trapping, pulling, dragging a girl is out as far as socially acceptable love is concerned.



and yet, when these things happened in ipk, i couldn't help but feel the roiling throbbing real emotions in those moments. i could also not say these things don't happen. nor could i say, if this happens you need to walk out on the whole relationship.



fighting, yelling, getting a little, no a lot, out of control i have come to know to be part of deep emotion. especially love. there are people who by disposition are calm and they will express and experience love within the extent and boundaries of their nature. then there are more naturally ebullient people, such as myself. but i think anyone, if they really feel this emotion, will be touched by it and moved to do things they normally may never do.

it's been more than thirty three years since i fell in love madly with a young man. he was handsome, funny, totally exciting, and he had this crazy upbeat view of life that carried me away. this december it will be thirty years since we married.



when i see asr and khushi fight and take things to extremes at times. when i see them err... both of them... and then come back to each other, i am so reminded of my life, my love.



there is an inherent tension in utter love. if there weren't, poetry, literature, art would not be devoted to it. 

if you love someone you just may overstep boundaries.



and when you do, if it is love, its call will get to you, catch you, bring you back... and even make you consider your actions with deep honesty. you may be able to modify certain things as the love fills you... some things though will remain... part of nature. part of your love story.



your lover will make the decision to live with it or not. as will you. 

there has been a lot of hurting and forgiveness and feeling and heartache in my years with this feeling. many things have not been politically correct... 

but i have known in my heart this is love. that was all i needed to know at times.

i must absolutely stress here, i am not including even for a moment and even an iota of physical violence in this. that is not politically incorrect, that is wrong and no one who loves you, hits you, beats you up. no exceptions to this fact. 

so yes, asr pulled and dragged khushi as if unable to hold himself back, angry why he often didn't even know. yes, the story took them to the terrible night of a bizarre wedding, but had asr hit her... i'd have switched off the telly. there'd be no indiandisspyaarko.

ipk touched the nature of this emotion we call love. not in pretty scenes always, but it got the feeling like very few things i have seen have. there was a sensing of the effects of this hard to describe emotion, how it descends from nowhere and yanks you in, takes over your mind and strikes your heart.



and it rejoiced in this feeling, honouring it.



i can see khushi and asr thirty years from now... they will still be doing nok jhok and at times clashing wildly. ask either of them to change even one line of their love story, they'll possibly yell... pagal ho gayi ho kya. have you gone mad.



okay, maybe that whole achhi bahu part khushi will ask for a little real kkg elements to be brought in there, asr may say enough smiling, dammit! but even if you don't change a thing and let it be exactly as it is, they'd still be there years on... asr khushi and a girl falling into a man's arms one lit up evening, hamesha.

......................

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that look of love... a vm

watch vm that look of love

 

watch vm that look of love

 

i might have called this "blue my mind" (pun on sound intended) or even  "samjhi tum!" a mad urge to make a vm with those particular scenes, the gussa in them, the sanak in them and the essential asr kkg pyaar. spoke to kizh about it, she reminded me of the candlelight sighting. i had to make it, so while sipping laphroaig last night, just went for it. so beautiful, how could a simple daily soap have such beauty, what scenes ohohoho. 

the song which just came along as i frantically looked for something that would tell a story, is a major favourite of mine from teesri manzil with shammi kapoor's truly offbeat ways in the original picturisation. of course, rafi's sexy voice. this is a 1966 song, unbelievable.

indu mentioned in her post "glorious gussa and guileless girl," when i read it i instantly thought of the vm... both those things are such essentials of their love story...

posted the vm on india forums on 10 december 2014, wrote this at the time.

the original song and scene, i love this movie and shammi kapoor is just uff in this gana...

credit uploader

the song is written by majrooh sultanpuri and music is by r d burman. my attempt at translation...

tumne mujhe, dekha, ho kar mehrbaan,
you have looked at me... with such a grace/kindness/compassion...
 
ruk gayi yeh zameen, tham gayaa aasmaan,
the earth stood still, the skies halted,

jaan-e-mann, jaan-e-jaan,
my darling, life of my soul...
 
tumne mujhe, dekha, ho kar mehrbaan,
you have looked at me... with such a grace/kindness/compassion...

ruk gayi yeh zameen, tham gayaa aasmaan,
the earth stood still, the skies halted,

jaan-e-mann, jaan-e-jaan,
my darling, life of my soul...

tumne mujhe, dekhaa,...
you have looked at me...
 
o... kahin dard ke sehraa mein, rukte chalte hote,
o... in the wasteland of pain, had we stopped and fared
inn honthon kee hasrat mein, tapte, jalte hote,
yearning for these lips, scorching and burning

mehrbaan ho gayin, zulf kee badliyaan,
benevolent became your cloud like tresses...
jaan-e-mann, jaan-e-jaan,
my darling, life of my soul...

tumne mujhe, dekha, ho kar mehrbaan,
you have looked at me... with such a grace/kindness/compassion...

ruk gayi yeh zameen, tham gayaa aasmaan,
the earth stood still, the skies halted,
jaan-e-mann, jaan-e-jaan,
my darling, life of my soul...

tum ne mujhe, dekhaa,...
you have looked at me... 
o... lekar yeh haseen jalwe, tum bhee na kahaan pahunche,
o... with these beautiful displays, where have you reached as well

aakhir ko mere dil tak qadmon ke nishaan pahunche,
at last, your footprints reach my heart...

khatm se ho gaye, raaste sab yahaan,
all paths seemed to end right here,

jaan-e-mann, jaan-e-jaan,
my darling, life of my soul...
 
tumne mujhe, dekha, ho kar mehrbaan,
you have looked at me... with such a grace/kindness/compassion...

ruk gayi yeh zameen, tham gayaa aasmaan,
the earth stood still, the skies halted,

jaan-e-mann, jaan-e-jaan,
my darling, life of my soul...

tumne mujhe, dekha, ho kar mehrbaan,
you have looked at me... with such a grace/kindness/compassion...

......................

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no copyright infringement is intended, this is purely fan appreciation work and has no commercial purpose. many thanks to all original owners of material.

episode 80 samjhi tum

 
"asr, tum theek ho na?"... "asr?" 

"enough, khushi!" rough voice, end of tether. an uneasy silence. sorry, lavanya. the headache is splitting, and a girl's defiance is playing havoc into it. not letting you go. you can't get away, not this time. i'll say what i have to, you'll stay. every exit is denied. erotic blocking in an enclosed space. a hot sunday afternoon in a bothered storeroom. he had not been able to say what he wanted to. but today, he will.

speak, scream, shout, cry, "kyunki jab tak tum meri baat sun nahin leti yahan se hil nahin sakti. ghar par koi dikhai nahin de raha hai... woh issliye kyunki gharpar koi.. hai nahin." how he enjoyed telling her there's no one at home. no one.

"samjhi tum?" the decibel crashed the sound barrier.

do what you've come here to do, take your money and leave...and keep your ideas of marriage to yourself. do you understand, miss khushi kumari gupta?

she felt her blood race, her anger pulsate... not my idea. and she had to tell him all... everything, every little bit of it... even that he was scared, maybe because he couldn't keep such a commitment. you don't know how to do this in your kind of transactional relationships. in fact, i feel ... aapke character hi dheela hai. your character is loose. 

could that ever go unpunished?

 
what was he doing? what?

no, this couldn't be happening...  
 
"kissne kaha ki meri baat khatam ho gayi hai... kya kaha tumne...  ki mera character dheela hai... main tumhe bata ta hoon ki character dheela kya hota hai." you say my character is loose, ok let me show you what character dheela means.

no!

his anger had spiralled again. and it would do serious damage.

finally, it got a bit too much for her. all the playing and running and getting caught and everything, things we are not asked to find words for, because then they just might lose their meaning. all of it... just a bit too much. how could this man do this to her? red hot feelings scalded everything it touched.

he had to let go.

hum abhi aate hain. 

as she walks away to find a moment to restore calm, she stops and the tears come. he has left his mark on her arm.. rabba vey sweet and comforting... what is this intimacy, rough or tender, all of it is owned, all of it is part of self, all of it is a feeling. that you can't deny, destroy, diminish. some call it love, others just struggle to give it a name.

he stands outside, knowing she is inside, suffering, and he is filled with pain. har baar, every time, as he would tell her months later. he had to make her cry, but it had to hurt him more.

that instinctive yoking again. sees her face in candle light... hey hey...

"asr, jab tumne mujhe girte hue dekha tab meri help kyun nahin kari." why didn't he help his girlfriend? again 
darkness tried to show him light.

why don't some hurts ever go away.
why can't some thoughts be stopped. maybe this time, it won't go all the way...

but no. it will, it must. maa!

he might have gone under today, had she not come, had she not reminded him with her presence of the safest place he'd ever known. children of the same mother. she knows his mind, its scream, it's suffocating submerged pain. the ocean has many things in it. sometimes all that floats up is dark and angry and deathly. and it wants to take you down. 

he encircles her with his arms, sitting there, and buries his head, his face in her lap, hugging her, asking her for love and giving whatever he has to give.

"bas chhotey bas."

"di wo..."

"kuchh mat kaho" tear soaked voice, drenched in the sorrow of a love that went too soon too soon... "di, kuch kaam tha kya."

was this an untrained bpo exec turned actor in a tackily produced telly serial? then why was i listening to his every heartbeat, every nuance of voice, tears threatening to pour out of my eyes. old age is really getting the better of me.

every year when this date comes close, you miss mama papa a lot... you really remember them... a beautiful loving sister sensitive to his feelings... mostly. but he can't indulge in this for too long. himmat dikhai maine. pulled himself up by the bootstraps at 14, now he does it as a matter of course... it's become his way... main theek hoon, di. just for a moment asr had become a little boy whose hurting never ended. but now he is okay. 

everybody hurts, everybody cries, sometimes.

......................

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episode 260 why him

"hume chhoone ki koshish bhi mat ki jiye aur bahar nikal jaiye yahan se," don't even try to touch me and leave this room, she says.

he grabs her hand.

"aapke aansoo sirf usske liye bahte hain jo aapko sabse zyada dard diya hai," your tears flow only for the one who has given you the most amount of hurt, he is perplexed, pained almost. why is it so, he wants to know.

"aapko sach mein nahin pata..." you really don't know, do you... she has a strange smile as she says that.

there might have been no need to write anything on this episode, watching was hard enough, but for the little something i thought i noticed in the shyam khushi interaction.

was there an attempt to bring back complexity... that natural human element of envy and obsession, both quite a part of shyam's mind. he directly asks her what is it about the other guy that makes her want him, his touch though he is so incredibly nasty to her, gives her only sorrow and hurt, it seems to really perplex him. yes, he is disgusting to even be there with that phone as his excuse and his weapon... but he felt more real for an instant than the lecherous obvious flat one of the shirtless episode and the others in recent times. his agony seemed genuine and his obsession too... he lost his cool with his wife. the carefully maintained facade which holds through most things, slipped. something about khushi wanting asr and almost telling him how much when she says rhetorically, you really don't know do you, just penetrates that thick coat of self enraptured amoral/immoral excessive egoistic godless gunk and he bleeds. he also knows that his game was not played to adroitly, she knows he is not interested in the papers he had been feigning great interest in just to keep her on tenterhooks and perhaps to adhere her to him. both his dil and dimaag are challenged. it leaves him shaken.

my feeling, in a rather inspired creative take and with clever writing, shyam in his core was the other side of asr... shyam was often painted with asr like features but with definitely the ugly end of the brush. he too had that shatir thing, he too had a feeling for khushi, he too believed in making his own life... but he lacked an essential element, something asr practically defined... conscience. and yes, an inalienable purity in the materials that made him... shyam was ashudh, impure incarnate, maybe that's why his hindi had to be so shudh, so pure. and so we saw the other side of those very traits. no idea why but i am thinking of ghee spilling on asr at janmashtami and some sort of message of his purity coming through, ignore my wild mind.

for a moment i felt for shyam that more complex feeling... he felt like a real human being with a completely messed up character. something of the fallen angel perhaps in him... the one he adores shuns him and prefers another. no matter how wrong or warped or vicious he is, a sense of an emotion in him, a genuine cut.

had they worked with that, might have been interesting, but they kept waffling and shifting and finally made him completely meaningless.

i must say, i felt bad for abhaas. not a bad actor he... to have stripped his shyam of all subtlety and made him loud and meaningless was not good for the story and really sad for abhaas. he might have pulled off a far more shaded character, though yes, shyam never ever was the true antagonist of asr. stature just not there.

here his envy of asr is quite clear... what is it about him that you like so much... why do you reject me.

hints of this will keep coming up i seem to recall. but nothing will be done to make it part of narrative.

apart from this one thing, 260 really felt as though all creatives had taken time off and left writing, direction, editing, sound, everything to rookies and interns. perhaps 258 and 259 exhausted them.

otherwise how can anyone after those dhamakedar twist episodes, for once living up to the eternal tv serial promise, have regressed to this.

in terms of the logic of khushi opting out of involving cops and looking for private investigators, there was nothing off. but everything else was. everything. including the way manorama mami's antenna sprang up and how she got involved. it was as if people with no knowledge of ipk were suddenly directing it. and what was that whole detective agency set up... the writing was so obvious you wanted to run and hug them and say there there... really.

i have noticed that in my earlier pieces i have said that i believe writers led by ved raj and gautam hegde tried their best to hang onto the whole thing, but channel and trp and an "adjusting" production house were too much to push back against. i am a copywriter, i know these sort of pressures can ruin things... but now more and more i feel, someone fairly senior among the writers also just let it go... lost the passion.

that was the thing.

that passion one could always feel earlier now seemed to diminish. only to reappear in little patches here and there. and every time it did, it brought utter beauty. alas the lack of passion also took us to the other end of that.

260 certainly was not touched by passion.

and there was no barun. 

......................

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about kkg

(part of a chat on india forums)

she was lovely. i resisted watching ipk for months because i did not, could not believe a hindi serial could have anything of real excitement in it... i was not being a snob, till then no serial of these days had really appealed even those with decent stories.

i used to lie on my bed with my back to the tv while things carried on giving me a sense of india... i needed that after many years away...

also i was resisting barun.

as hard as i could.

huh some silly boy, so what i get that funny feeling every time i see him... something about him says my mind... but really he's just a useless serial hero... who does he think he is... as you can tell maine bahut koshish ki... sigh.

i remember one afternoon i turned around and there on the screen was this crazy looking girl with tight choti, tight weird pompom infested churidar, bizarre colours, and mojri and jhola, talking 3456734 to the dozen, and i said uff another ridiculous serial heroine, how crazy looking is she, what's with the costume...

but i kept watching.

she was such a delight.

naturally truly strange. a real girl, with all sorts of thoughts and things, and a different turn of phrase, view of life.

in fact, in 80, just before the hot arm twisting, her speech on marriage... never have i ever heard such a beautiful defence of marriage, such a real heartfelt understanding... sanaya took her dialogues and made them real feelings of a young girl with innocence, strength, genuine cookiness, lots of guts and plenty happy jhalli. a character who became a person with her.

the loss of this girl hurts. yes the make up is heavier... an accent on prettifying... such a reducing of a genuinely funky person, her light lipstick, her tiny jhumkas matching, her teda choti, her khushi from within, as pagal par cute as her aankhen, her baal, her (imagine break in voice) smile. above all, her mind and its crazy connections, its gentle sweet faith in life, its light flowing touch that healed, its refusal to take it lying down, so ingrained that when it showed it felt normal, not like some writers had written her character. (the other day, my husband noticed a scene from another serial by chance while i surfed, he said, oh they are trying to make her do a khushi... this is a man who did not watch ipk... just a few early episodes and yes the august 1 fight.)

post the decision to marry again, the look went even more strange. her dialogues became duller, she had true sanka, not shrill voiced ott, who forgot that.

but we shall always have the khushi we love right up to the wedding... dm is much thanked for that. 

n i s h a n a   e p i s o d e s

.........

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