Movie: Astitva

Actors: Tabu
Director: , Producer:



A few weeks ago I finally found time to go out for a movie with my wife. In India, this is how you do it, you tell Shiv Kumar to get on the Bajaj Sunny and head for Chanakya theatre where when I was younger a few centuries ago side-balcony cost three very difficult to find rupees and sixty paisas, and I walked from school on a bunk-date to see Jawani-Diwani with Shakuntala Ghosh, tell Shiv Kumar to wear helmet but don`t get caught by the pollution squad, and may all of you in the evolved West go green with envy in your own huge automobiles while you use up my space in the ozone hole.



Well Shiv Kumar went to the correct theatre but the movie I wanted to see, "Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar" was not running but some self-onanist oxymoronish fable called "Astitva" about a woman who has a baby from her pansy musician lover while her stud husband who can trade internationally, fertilisers in bulk probably, but can`t count past 9 months without taking his shoes off to reach his diary to check his passport to work out the immigration stamp dates . . . long story cut short is that movies like this end in family feuds which make me feel like wringing Shiv Kumar`s neck but then who, who, will go to the bank and deposit the Tax Deducted at Source challan?



So anyways strolling back to the parking lot we pull over to the Tibetan momo stalls run by visitors from Dharamshala who can`t sell too many shawls anymore after Hilary ji made a statement about blank pant suits. You know Hilary ji, very popular lady in USA occupied New York. Just like Kashmir, New York also is ours. Momos outside Chanakya in Delhi cost 40 rupees for 7, stuffed with chicken and steamed in front of you which forgives a movie where I cannot make out if, towards the end, the mother-in-law and her daughter-in-law are, like, lesbians? Now, nothing wrong with lesbians, but I just want to know, were they? Did they?



My wife beats me up. When Led Zep played Kashmir, they voted for Indians keeping it, right?



Next day we are at a party, where we are not talking to each other, we are not even smiling across the room to each other. I am trying my best to pretend that I am a divorced male to this amazingly Junoesque lady and something overtakes my otherwise foggy senses and so I tell her, the Junoesque lady, that I am out on bail after an episode of particularly violent wife-beating, I am thinking maybe she is from USA occupied New York where this is going to be next Olympic sport, synchronised, maybe even underwater!



At this stage my wife walks across the room, yanks my beard out of the most luscious bosom it is about to spill into in years and declares to most anybody who will listen sotto voce that she will not walk out on me with her daughter-in-law. Our son is 14, I say, but as I see the first cousins to Katy Mirza flounce away in bewildered spin I know I have lost what could have been a great handful. Oh tempora, no mores. I cannot review this movie anymore. All those who though that here is another great review, well, sorry, Hey Ram!



No, not allowed, you still want the movie review badly? The movie review by Veeresh Malik is popular, rolling on the floor, you say? OK. Wife dances, husband works, wife seduces dance teacher, husband works, wife has baby, husband works, wife inherits fortune from lover, husband gets to work on her, finally. Realising too late that by then the hall wishes that Tabu would stop trying to imitate Dev Anand`s Guide with angst a generation or two later.



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The real movie ofcourse my bored fellow friends in USA occupied America and elsewhere, including the Three Gorges Dam, is about the USA President. I think we get a different CNN in India which has nothing to do except look like Little Lulu in Austin versus Garth in Florida minus bubbles in which they spoke. Actually, one grew up thinking that Americans walked around talking in little bubbles and so I used words like "Aw gee whiz" when I was in school.



Aw, gee whiz, the movie was so dumb. Because the actors, they were hams. Not even mad cows. Mad cows are in Frankfurt.



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Tabu is a great actress. She has this husky voice, long neck and a jawline that says "give it to me baby uh-huh uh-huh". In this movie she is the wrongly right wife. Hubby somebody or the other is blamed for working too hard. Question: who would have paid for the music lessons otherwise? No, that is not relevant. Score one for the feminists, no? No.



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This was not a movie. No rape, no dance in rain, no cabaret. What is this Hindi film world coming to? It has, almost, been occupied.