సముద్రం

In the secondhalf of Premam, when Nivin Pauly meets Madonna Sebastian in his bakery and she tells him that she's Celine, the kid who used to deliver his love letters, there is a moment when it hits him and as incredulity spurts on his face, his eyes widen, he gasps as his hand involuntarily goes to his mouth open in astonishment. It is an incredible shot and I remember shuddering in that instant. As I write this, I'm still getting little goosebumps of pleasure. Another similar, equally unexpected shot, was in 96 when the young Jaanu looks at the young Ram in their class. I don't remember what happens in the scene but the actor who played the young Jaanu pulled off that reaction with such panache that I gasped.

In Three of Us, which Sravani and I just finished watching, there is a scene when we are in Shefali Shah's POV as a distracted Jaideep Ahlawat walks out of his office, his mind elsewhere, and we wait with her for him to look at her/ us. Avinash Arun masterfully holds the shot, and there is a good 5-second stretch when Ahlawat is right at the centre of our attention but we're beyond his periphery. I was anticipating his expression but still let out a cry of joy when he finally looked into the camera and his face went through micro-adjustments, almost like a low resolution video upscaling into high resolution in real-time which was probably what was happening to the character internally as well as this face he hadn't seen in 28 years triggered such complex computations that he was utterly bewildered with the speed with which he time-travelled and incredulous at the barrage of feelings unleashed upon him¹. In that moment, I fell in love with Jaideep Ahlawat. 

I've always been enamoured by him. From the moment I saw him in Gangs of Wasseypur, I've admired his screen presence. I was completely bowled over by him in Dipakar Banerjee's superlative film in Lust Stories, especially the scene where so ridicuously, so raucously, so inappropriately he and Sanjay Kapoor digress abruptly into the "Half fry, half fry, half fry" anecdote, and his face lights up as he bursts out laughing only to be as suddenly brought back to grimness and fear by Manisha Koirala's utterance. He was memorably good in Sandeep aur Pinky Faraar, and I beamed with pride (for having seen it before others?) as he was universally luaded for his performance as Haathi Ram in Pataal Lok. 

Yet what I felt today was different. It is what I felt when I saw Pankaj Tripathi in that kheer scene in Masaan. And with Irrfan Saab sometime during watching The Namesake for the first time. It isn't just admiration or awe for their art. I feel that almost always for Manoj Bajpai and quite often for Rajkumar Rao. Now as I write this, I realise that Gulshan Deviah falls between these two camps. Anyway, back to the love. It isn't respect and gratitude too. Like I feel for Vivek Sagar and Anurag Kashyap and Dibakar Banerjee and Vishal Bhardwaj and Javed Saab and Gulzar Saab and Richard Linklater and Charlie Kaufman and David Foster Wallace.. and others. I have no other word for it except love. And in true love fashion, it is not at the level of the oeuvre but simply at the level of the moment, impression, sensation. A mental photograph that becomes more and more loaded with every remembrance². It is very hard to express or analyse or even justify it. As much as I loved him in Masaan and Newton, I don't find Pankaj Tripathi as endearing or convincing in his more recent performances. That phase is over. Nonetheless, it would be false to claim the moment didn't exist. I don't even know what it is exactly that I've fallen in love with- the genius of their acting where even as one is aware of the aspect of 'performance', one can't help but be affected by it³? Or rather by the naked, vulnerable humanity that peeks through all the craft? Or that I've identified/ aspired to be the character so much that I have the parallel epiphany? Or something else? 

I don't know the answer, and don't really want to know it either. I'm so glad though that I get to experience those moments. One should keep falling in love. I don't think one can stay in love, so our best case scenario is to keep falling in as often as we can. I am, for all practical purposes, an atheist. Yet, I don't think these moments are less religious, less transcendental than what's experienced by a believer. I'm a believer too- in the beauty and surprises and complexities and magnanimity of life.

¹ "Reason is revelation from within; Revelation is reason from without" -From the gorgeously sophisticated thinker Waleed Aly's People Like Us

² Amit Varma and his exposition on the recursive nature of memory

³ You might know full well that Wasim's now going to bowl the reversing yorker but still be helpless to defend against it