After NATARANG

And I was in front of movie screen. I needed 15 minutes to reach to one of the old movie theaters in my city and 20 rupees (!) to get in. Fans running with limited electric supply, dress circle people sitting on the chairs as they are on the sofas in their bungalows, words flowing around me about anything under this sun and then suddenly screen lit, names flash without troubling much and the song which I expected to encounter somewhere later in the movie, starts, theater, full with whistles, theater full with cries, at a times vulgar, city with rural heart, is full on….
The movie was Natarang’. Atul Kulkarni has performed role of his lifetime. He gained weight and then lost it more miraculously. He expresses what an artist living in the worst suited conditions for can feel. He expressed what a person trying to live in the situation where mere subsistence is worth. But. More than it, above from all, he made me feel the shift an artist can face, when he is made to perform the role he never imagined. And, then storms that were inevitably lead to him, challenging his identity, as a person, as an artist, as a man! And, yet he lives, he wins, and that too not leaving the art which gave him name, took away all which was dear to him and brought him to a point where he was no more he. There are flaws in the story, sudden jumps of un-reality, double meaning jokes and some vague representation of what situation could have been. It would have been more intense, more effectively represented. Nevertheless, when it was over, the last name from credit list flashed on the screen, I was in one another world, a strange peace, a new understanding of what these performing arts are.
‘Tamasha’ is essentially rural performing art. Even though now it is been credited by hegemony of Marathi culture by all so called urban cultural stalwarts, merely two or three generations before it was ‘place of scoundrels’. It is vulgar. But, then it has to be. A labor spending day in the field, in a family with ageing parents, tried wife and ever-growing number of children seeks purely sensual entertainment. Is this not what naturally comes to mind of those? May be urban mind cannot accept such direct call to sexual expressions. They love it sugar quoted. But, then what sense we can make about Devid Dhawan’s movies? Is it not the fact that large chunk of urban population watch movies which do not need any mental or emotional assistance? People, with spending most of the time in survival activity, need entertainment that calls directly to their senses. ‘Tamasha’ did it effectively for years. I am not denying that it generated some serious social question. It was surely chauvinistic. But, then it was time that shaped it like this. Artists involved in making it what it was, did it mostly as what market demanded. It is true for all art forms, which are for masses. They need to respond to what their public needs. They did it. And, even in these days, when dholaki is no more heard, pagote ans sheli are no more thrown in air as response to sensational step by dancer and ghungarus are no more lightening stage, music can make wonder. Natarang did it.
Social fabric is woven by many individual threads. The colors and patterns are not planned before they actually come to existence. They are visible much after people who made it left the scene. Now when, expressions are becoming same (i.e.globalization) all around the globe, people who in past made life worth living in different corners of earth and remain in the darkness still someone discovered them much after they left us, are getting their standing ovations, possibly the last one.
Here is mine.