Oh, the horror of it all

I saw 'Khatta Meetha' last night - by accident, as it happens. For those of you familiar with my hemming-and-hawing style, you've got to have picked up on the fact that something is very wrong. H does *not* cut to the chase like this. Unless she's spending it all on the title - remember that Delhi piece? It remains my favourite one to-date. Anyhow, it was the only movie we could get tickets for on a Tuesday night which saw 89.56% of the population of Ahmedabad struggle to fit into 3 cinema halls. True story.

I didn't want to see it, but we were already there, it was beginning to rain; let's just say we thought we could do worse than to sit in a movie hall and watch what we naively presumed would be just another mindless flick.

It wasn't. It was the head-fuck from hell. I can *do* mindless - I don't have a chip on my elegant Parsi shoulder about that; but this was just wrong. The moral axis of the movie's semiosphere was so skewed, it was bloody horizontal. A flat-line; no heartbeat. Whether it's the hero's "lovable hooligan" of a side-kick staring in on an unsuspecting woman bathing, or the hero slapping the love of his life because she ignored his diktat to boycott their college exam, this movie affords innumerable examples of everything that we know to be wrong, even as it holds up the mirror to a society which winks, nudges, and condones these 'slights'. I could barely breathe in there; that is how angry this movie made me.

What exacerbated things, of course, was seeing the full-to-capacity theatre wet itself laughing at inanities so over-the-top/phy-sic(k)al-slap-sticky/done-to-death/racist-sexist-classist, that even my pet toad, had I one, would have sickened at the sight/sound of it. I despair (it *can* be used as a verb. Shut up). And fear.

To echo my-10-minute-ago-self, Oh, the horror of it all.