Top 5 Romantic Scenes

No. 5: Where Mr. Darcy confesses his love to Elizabeth and she turns him down.
Despite my dislike for the much hyped novel, this is one scene which I love. He confesses his love and proposes marriage, a proposal seeking to present the depth of his feelings through the conflict of mind her circumstances put him in and his complete helplessness when it comes to her marked by the unwillingness with which he bestows his affection. She, to his complete surprise does not take kindly to it and turns him down flat.


No. 4: Where the number makes its iconic appearance
"You know something?"
"What?"
"I love you."
"How much?"
"Huh?"
"How much do you love me?"
"A lot. A lot lot lot."
"How much is that?"
"Umm...(lightbulb glows)..27.5"
"What?"
"Yeah. I love you 27.5. Thats how much I love you"
"Only 27.5?!"


No. 3: Where Mike(James Stewart)Connors kisses Tracy Lord (twice)
This is the night before Tracy Lord is supposed to get married to George Kittredge, a complete ass. But in the scene preceding the party, Tracy and Stewart seem to be getting drawn to each other.
"What's the matter with Tracy?" He asks.
"You tell me, will you?"
"Darned if I know. I'd like to."

After the party, they're both completely drunk on champagne. She's mocking him, calling him 'Professor', when his fascination with her comes to the fore.
"There's a magnificence in you, Tracy. A magnificence that comes out of your eyes and your voice...in the way you stand there, in the way you walk. You're lit from within, Tracy. You've got fires banked down in you...hearth fires and holocausts!"
"I don't seem to you made of bronze?"
"No. You're made out of flesh and blood. That's the blank, unholy surprise of it. You're the golden girl, Tracy...full of life and warmth and delight."

The he kisses her. "Golly!", she says. He kisses her again. "Golly Moses!"


No. 2: Where they almost kiss in Dil Se and the song Dil Se
They discuss the things they like and dislike the most in Ladakh. Shahrukh is still trying to court her, she gradually getting drawn to him; this scene and the one preceding it where they walk and discuss what sort of kids they would have is charged with chemistry. She actually never lets on how much she is beginning to like him, but you can see it in her glances. He, on the other hand is completely awed by the mystery surrounding her. ("Mujhe sabse pasand hai tumhari ye aankhein, kyonki main kitna inme dekhta hun mujhe kuch dihkai hi nahi deta")
The title track is shot most beautifully. He, imagining a whole whirlwind romance through the song, imagining himself as her knight in shining armour in a terror-ridden Assam.


No. 1: Where they steal glances in the listening room in Before Sunrise
This scene is absolutely brilliant and anyone who has ever been, nervously in love will relate to it, immediately. The keep glancing at each other and try not to let the other catch them doing it. Julie Delpy is cutness incarnate, and Ethan Hawke's expressions are priceless in various places, most notably where he takes a long look at her, smiling to himself all through that you can almost feel how much he is enjoying looking at her.

The Historic Trip to Town Part - II

For as long as I can remember, I have always imagined my life as a part of a larger narrative, chronicled in black and white, in still photographs and in film with a background score set to it. Perhaps it is just that I have always wanted to be a storyteller that I like to imagine my own life as scenes from a novel or movie.

Therefore, in my mind the following scenes are recapitulated with elaborate camera movements and soundtracks.

Setting: Guy waiting amidst barbed wires and telephone booths. Dimly lit scene in the part of night when the dawn in just about to set in.

As she becomes visible walking out from her hostel, the initial chords in The Sounds of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel begin to play. The song plays till she walks up to him.

"What have you put on your face?"
"On my face?!"
"Yeah. It looks different. More shiny."
And something changed.


******

Setting: Inside a BMTC bus. It is still before sunrise.

The camera follows them as they enter the bus and take a seat right at the back. As they sit, Aye Khuda Hafiz from Yuva starts. The camera angle keeps switches between shots of them sitting together and shots of her through his eyes beginning at her face and down to her hands. The song continues right till before Lucky Ali and Alisha Chenoy get into 'wo wos' at the end of the first verse and ends as they settle into a conversation about bus rides with the final long shot of the bus turning at crossing.


******

Setting: Walking up Brigade Road

Dream sequence as he watches her walk ahead and as the guitar starts strumming in the background, he breaks into You've really got a hold on me by the Beatles. They walk along a closed KFC, cigarette shops and the Nigiris which sells imported mangoes(or are they to be exported?) as he continues singing.


******

Setting: In Kaycee's, a small South Indian place, one of the least glamorous and memorable on Church Street which was the only place to be open at that hour.

Dev Chanda Theme 1 plays out as they throw probing questions about respective crushes and those others who had a crush on them.


******

Setting: A figure with a lit cigarette and smoke in a dark room.

A deep, impassive voice recites poetry with only the slight disturbance of the telephone line punctuating it.

What do I want of you?
To walk away with, from the rest.
As in privacy, you discard ceremony
Let your thoughts flow in front of me.
Lean on my shoulders, clasp my fingers.
My love, vouchsafe to me what you have vouchsafed to none.
What no brother, husband, friend and physician was privileged to know.
Talk of all and sundry, vacuities, the pain of existence, the pleasure of living.
Life's big despairs and small glories, what at this moment you lie thinking.
Tell me the whole story.


******

You'd think it would be character
but you would think it wrong
All my men were characters
and most of them are gone

You'd think you should be similar
but no that's not it
the similar ones had my same faults
and we bored ourselves a bit.

You'd think it should be passion
but that's just ebb and flow
love can spark that back again
and then the fireworks show

You'd think it should be purpose
and I thought that for a while
for what then am I loving,
a man or his profile?

You'd think it would be trust
but everyone betrays
the one they love
in just too many ways.

You'd think it should be sacred
and then I think again
you have to forgive each other
and start it new again.

You'd think it could be intelligence
I like men who are smart
but it's courage and compassion
all the parts of heart

You'd think it would be happiness
and you might be close to right
but I need my space and darkness too
and that can start a fight.

You'd think it might be talking
and I think that might be close
but how he fills the silence
cause I just hate verbose.

You'd think he should be a hero
but I don't need much saving
I've saved myself for some long time
I'd rather watch him shaving.

You'd think it should be simple
to know that dueling men
argue from their own conceits
and love themselves again.

You'd think it would be hard to find
because no love had I found
till I saw him standing there
when I finally turned around.

You'd think it should be peaceful
but we started out with fighting-
and then he wrote his poems just for me.
And I don't need sky writing.

You'd think it might be many things
but I think that it's this
That I just make him happy
and that we just persist.

The Historic Trip To Town Part - I

"I feel like having a zinger burger."
"We could go now."

The above dialogue occurred at 3:45 am on an April morning and was the beginning of events which led to what, in the coming years was to be referred to as the 'historic trip to town.' In retrospect, I also consider it as the time when things began to change between us.

When one likes another and another is aware of it, the pretense involved between them is of a most fascinating sort. Another is aware that one likes another but chooses to keep mum about it. Neither make any mention of it whatsoever. It is one of those things which everyone knows but has a sacred tacit status accorded to it when the two relevant parties are present together. One will mope and sigh about it in front of others yet act as if he was guarding the secret with his life in front of another. Many an hours are spent by one going over whether another is aware of his affections, analysing inane conversations several times over. Another, meanwhile acts quietly unaware of the whole thing in front of one, at times not being able to resist asking seemingly innocent questions probing at the heart of the matter, yet always unsure of how much she wants to 'finds' out.

Therefore, nighttime conversations became the norm without registering too much surprise on either side.

"You know, I like talking to you. We should work out a deal that we talk all night till you get married."
"Looks like you want to seriously injure my health."
"Insomnia is healthy. Look at me. How is your boyfriend incidentally?"

Bombay Rain

Diagonal rain. Waves scud towards the sand

crest and trough. Through clouds, a strand
of light shimmers down to a silvered zone of sea.
The gulls circle its uncertainty.
And rains - untimely, unsure, sporadic
throw off schedules, flood roads, congest traffic.
A sea of umbrellas on the street
And late by an hour, boy and girl meet
I watch the rain, think of thee

Cleansing her soul, you that she.

Two of us

February 24, 2008

My day began at the Churchgate station. It was past 2 p.m. when I arrived at the station but for me the day has just begun. I have always felt that it is an excessively Western thing to believe that the day changes at midnight. There are times when you do not know whether it’s today or tomorrow. You’ve been doing what you were doing since it was yesterday and since you’ve been awake it’s still today in your head. But when you think of it, it is tomorrow. But as long as I don’t sleep, I do not feel that the day has changed. It’s almost as if the day has stretched beyond the stipulated hours and is surviving on borrowed time. There are times when I lose the sense of time and stick to my own ways to define it. Yesterday ended when I left the office today where I had been working all night and half the day and today began as I descended from the train some stations ahead to meet her.

Waiting outside Eros, I am mildly disturbed. For some strange reason, I am reminded of the image of Sachin waiting for a very young Poonam Dhillon outside a movie theatre in Trishul. She never made it for the rendezvous, meeting an accident on the way but she arrives in a while, late as usual, but better late than not.

There are many different ways in which two people behave as they meet each other. Some launch into a dramatic monologue expressing extreme pleasure and good fortune at this opportunity fate has provided them with(case in point a former roommate), some attempt an eloquent pause as they offer their hand for a handshake(a roommate), others still just start off talking about whatever they intend to talk about(another former roommate). But whenever I met her, it was always the same. She always starts by being preoccupied with something or the other, paying the auto-driver, staring at something across the road that caught her fancy but comes out her reverie in a few seconds and immediately launches into an anecdote about whatever happened to her most recently. I am amazed at the consistency with which this cycle is repeated.

We head to The Pizzeria for lunch. As we settled down for lunch, both of us grope for a distance which was once ours. I think we are trying to gauge something without realizing it. Can we still talk? Through a stroll around the Marine drive, a visit to the Oxford bookstore (a tribute to Rishabh) and to Bombay University(is it Mumbai University now?), walking around in circles and letting life take the same course, through broken chappals and aching legs, local trains and five star hotels, discotheques and a trip down the memory lane, we discover that we can. Feminist reflections to “auratein haraamzaadi hoti hai!”, law school and its trappings, new-fangled theories on love and marriage, romanticism and acceptance; we traverse familiar and overdone concepts yet it is refreshing.

“You know I can imagine us not talking for say, three years and suddenly running into each other and..”

“And picking up immediately from there.”

“Yeah.”

Some things never change in life. Her laughter clichéd though this sounds, ready and extremely naughty wit, scandalized responses, a taste for irony, the detached sympathetic way in which she speaks of herself, mean and dismissive yet classy reflections on all and sundry, the half smile lingering on the face, the easy candor. Some others do.

“We’re best this way”

A luncheon date which extends into many more hours through the day, and night as we let this day turn into one of those where two people decide to just sit and discuss their fears, the changes they have undergone, the end of childhood and the pains of growing up, dreams and compromises and how life has changed, for the better or for the worse. There is something about people you know and who know you; you can always talk to them no matter how much life changes. Why do we always talk like this, theorizing about life, analyzing everything from a psychological angle yet the whole process never getting pretentious as it does with others, throwing in random anecdotes, and always talking in terms of general principles without really saying much directly about our lives, yet saying a lot. The past, with all its complications looms large, yet we can talk like this simply because we are two people who want to.

It is late morning by the time I drop her to her place. I take a cab back to the Churchgate station. As I embark the train and settle down, I fall asleep, my day ending exactly where it began.