Excuse the preponderance of posts about subjects that the world dismisses as frivolous or trivial. Hopefully, this will be the last one for a while, although I do not promise anything. After all, I don’t charge to entertain you. I can just as easily speculate about the eventual fate of Schrödinger's cat.
When I was growing up in the 1960s and early 70s, the cheapest movie tickets used to be for a part of the theater we called the pit class. The pit class was the first two or three rows less than 15 feet away from the screen which cost anywhere between 50 paise to a buck and a half.
The pit class was where the rabble which whistled at even the mildest suggestion of lewdness or, alternatively, grand heroics on screen was herded together. It was not segregation imposed by bigotry but necessitated by penury.The stuck-up and well-to-do crowd in the balcony would be envious of the pit class crowd because the latter enjoyed the movies so much more. I watched quite a few films from the pit class.
While there was nothing constitutionally mandated about it, the regulars in the pit class like me knew that if you wanted to whistle it had to be done in a certain way. Unless you could whistle the way the illustration below shows and make it sound really shrill, you were made to feel like an outsider. I could shrill-whistle then and can do so even now.
The pit class shrill whistle
I have gone to some lengths here to talk a little bit about an upcoming Hindi movie called “The Dirty Picture”, a sort of biopic about Silk Smitha, the “sultry and sexy siren” of an actress of the 1980s. It is not for me to vouch for the authenticity of the film’s content. My interest is the trailer which has all the ingredients that would bring the pit class down, if it was released in the 1960s or 70s.
It has lines like, “Public samaan dekhti hai, Dukan nahi (The public cares about the goods and not the store)” or “Waise bhi jab sharafat ke kapde utarten hein to sabse zyada maza sharifon ko hi hata hai. (In any case when decency is stripped, it is the decent who have most fun).” Both these lines are mouthed by a character played by Naseeruddin Shah in a wig which could well have been retrieved from the collection used by actor Jeetendra, the father and husband respectively of the movie’s producers, Ekta and Shobha Kapoor.
Then there is this gem from the luscious lips of Vidya Balan, who plays Silk: “Mujhe jo chahiye uska maza sirf raat ko hi aata hai (What I desire is best enjoyed only at night).”
However, the showstopper is this song: “Ooh lala ooh lala, Ooh lala ooh lala, Tu hai meri fantasy…Chhoo nana Chhoo nana, Chhoo nana Chhoo nana Ab mein jawan ho gayi. (Ooh lala ooh lala, Ooh lala ooh lala You are my fantasy (says the man), Don’t touch me Don’t touch me, Don’t touch me Don’t touch me I have blossomed now).”
The guiding philosophy of the movie’s writers seems not to leave anything to the imagination when everything can be spelled out in detail. What are words for after all?
