Love & Tamil Cinema

As a person who has hardly visited cinema theaters, I am beginning to feel if I have missed a lot of cinema (read as tamil cinema). Right from my childhood, I have never been so much into movies, let alone a few outings I made to the screens with my friends and family. I have heard and read about the big bustle which usually accompanies the release of a Rajini movie and the rasigar mandram shows which are screened before the actual release. I have heard stories from friends about how they went and fought with the crowd to see the "first-day first-show" of movies.

I started thinking about cinema and tried to put it in historical perspective. "Art and literature are the products of a society" is a famous saying. Early literature tells us a lot about the society and more generally a civilisation, that existed back then. We know a great deal about ancient and medieval times by the art and literature that survive from those periods. Poetry and to an extent literature are a thing of the past. No more do we have the likes of Keats or Wordsworths in our midst. We only have Mani Ratnams, Bharathirajas and their likes, in the contemporary era. Cinema, I can very confidently say, is the art and literature of the modern era.

Let us say, a millennium or two into the future (If the earth does survive till then),life on earth takes a whole new shape over the ages and is totally different from what we see now. Entertainment takes a new dimension too. But somehow people still want to know about the past and try to find out relics that might help give them a picture.Say, people dig up and find abandoned DVDs of tamil movies,which survive throught the ages !! What would people think, after watching movies from our era ? They would safely assume that people of our era were so in love that all movies had love as an integral and indispensable part; that there were men who were so poetic that they would sing nice songs (?!!) and woo their dream girls; that there were brave men who fought all the bad men in front of the public, with the people surrounding them and just watching; That the average girl of our era was so beautiful that there were so many men behind her; That when people felt compelled to express their love, they booked train or flight tickets, went to exotic locations along with a dancing group of 10 or 15, and danced along with them. These and much more. People would call our era , the "GOLDEN AGE" of Tamilnadu like we have been calling the Sangam periods when the Chera,Chola, Pandia kings ruled.

Back to the present, I am starting to think about what cinema has done to us and what it has not. It has definitely not potrayed society as it exists now.But it has hugely impacted the way we think. Seriously, take a moment to think about this - How many people back in the 60s and 70s were really into this thing called love, and how many love marriages happened back then ? And how many are into love these days and getting married ? Certainly a much larger number,I would say. Have all our people become so light at heart and gradually developed an eye towards the romantic side of life that we are seeing love everywhere ? Hasn't cinema played a big role in affecting how we think ? Yes, it has.

Bottomline: People have a distorted view of what is love. Every individual has the right to have his or her own convictions. But what people percieve and appreciate as love these days, is not what they think or what they like to think. It is what they are made to think. Convictions are out of place in the modern era. People no more seem to have their own likes or dislikes. They like whatever is thrown at them. I can very safely say, we have lost the appreciation for the subtle things in life.