Proof of Life

The whole thing started when my daughter, post a retro music event, remarked that the music piece played at the beginning was kind of catchy in a cute, quaint way… 

 

That’s all the opening I needed. I explained to her that it was the title music of a movie called Sholay that was released almost 50 years ago. With evangelist zeal, I suggested we catch it together on OTT, as it had been almost five years since I had last watched it for the 23^rd time, only to have suggestion summarily scorched…

 

That cut me to the quick. You see, for many of my vintage, responsible parenting comprises inculcating habits like good table manners, making the bed and being respectable to elders; watching Sholay would comfortably qualify to be part of this list. I realized I had been remiss… 

 

That was the mission then, should I choose to accept it. Make her watch Sholay. End to end…

 

Of course, in an endeavour like this, proper planning and foundation laying are essential. Step one was cunningly suggesting to her that we should make it a thing to watch movies on OTT together now and then. This was received with some initial suspicion, but eventually we got the ball rolling. To begin with, I had to yield to her choices to conceal the true purpose of the entire scheme. So I suffered through a ton load of tripe like Beast, Retro and even Pathan. Pure agony! But I soldiered on with nary a protest. 

 

Eventually, after demonstrating adequate commitment to the dad-daughter bonding exercise, it was my turn to pick. I won’t bore you with the details, but I had to really work at getting Sholay into the playlist. A combination of emotional blackmail, sulking and when nothing worked, some ungainly begging got things to the point finally where we settled down to watch Sholay, popcorn in hand. The popcorn was my touch, I was leaving nothing to chance here.

 

It was an excruciatingly hard journey. All the calls that my daughter would ruthlessly ignore during Leo and Retro were suddenly calls of critical import! The first 20 minutes were so stop and start, she kept losing the thread. About half an hour into the movie she just walked off claiming she had work to do and maybe we could watch it the next day…

 

I was a disturbed man that night. Couldn’t sleep. What does this say about my daughter’s character, was the thought running feverishly through my mind as I tossed and turned. Is she the kind of person who would not like Sholay? Where did we go so wrong in her upbringing. I confided in my wife over coffee the next day, but was rather disappointed with her lack of reaction. Her casual remark , “so what if she doesn’t like it”, was a rude reminder to me that she herself had seen Sholay only twice. Sometimes I wish I had popped this question to her early during our courtship, but anyway, that ship has sailed… I realized with a despairing heart that I was alone in this quest. 

 

Not the kind to give up easily, I confronted my daughter over dinner the next day on her abrupt walk-out. After some tenacious pushing and prodding I got to the root of the issue. Apparently, she found the film very patriarchal. She couldn’t understand why Jaya Bhaduri had to be such a sad character dressed in all white just because her husband had died. That Basanti had to be a stereotypical female chatterbox was deeply offensive to her gender sensibilities. Ironically, all through her diatribe, I’m sitting there unable to get in a word sideways…

 

Out of sheer despair, I decided to go all in. A weekend trip to Pondy if we watched it to the end. I know, shameless bribing, and I’m not proud of the example I was setting, but sometimes, the means are a distant second to the end, especially when the end is so noble…

 

So off we went again. In about 30 – 40 minutes of watching another of her important calls came up. Apparently it was going to be a long call so she called close of play. But by this time, Gabbar had had a chance to show up on screen, more Sholay things had happened. I was not certain, but something seemed to suggest that the filmmaking was beginning to make a dent on her defenses. 

 

That night, I was still disturbed, but for the first time since I undertook the mission, I detected a glimmer of hope. Not wanting to get lulled into a sense of false security, I lay awake into the wee hours of the morning, meticulously formulating my further course of action. 

 

The next few days, I didn’t explicitly mention the movie, but kept dropping some hints of about beaches and sunsets. Unfortunately, it seemed like it was falling on deaf ears. Or was I being too subtle? My heart was sinking again. How did this happen? I found myself critically examining her early childhood to figure out how this situation had come about. Was it that time when she, at the tender age of two, fell off the cot head first on the floor? Was it in her seventh year, when she was chased by a bunch of stray dogs and was so traumatized that she became a lifelong cynophobe? 

 

In the meantime, we had gone back to binge watching Brooklyn 99 and The Office. Hope had died a tragic death. And then one day, magically, she mentioned that we might as well finish watching Sholay. Moving like greased lightning, I booted up the movie and we settled down again. 

 

By now, Gabbar was doing his thing, Amitabh was being all tall and sardonic, Thakur’s grippingly tragic back story was laid bare for all to see. Mehbooba landed with a thunderous impact. As is my wont whenever I watch Sholay, I do a parallel delivery of every dialogue of every character. While earlier, she had tolerated this with a roll of her eyes, now she was actually shushing me. Bliss!

 

The rest of the way to the end was super smooth but it was her glowing closing comments that were sending me into raptures. I compiled a brief mental checklist and ran through it.

 

Did she cry when Jai died? Check.

Did she start randomly saying “arre o samba”, for instance when she wanted a second helping of sambhar during breakfast? Check.

Did she ask indignantly why there was no Sholay 2? Check.

Did she talk about wanting to visit Ramnagara near Bangalore sometime in life? Check.

 

Her reaction to each element of the movie was all that a parent could have asked for, leaving me quite mortified at my needless self flagellation. She liked Sholay! Her heart is in the right place. The sun shone through. Surely now she would go on to become a fine and upstanding adult who would contribute her bit to the world. 

 

In fact, expanding the boundaries of this point a bit, I would suggest we make this the ultimate test of proof of character, nay, of life itself. Seriously, corporates should do away with expensive psychometric tests like Myers-Briggs and just ask the question that matters : “Did you like Sholay?”. If the answer is “No”, you know you need to delve deeper into the darkness that lurks somewhere deep within the unfortunate soul. 

 

Or take the case of the overrated captcha. Recently, I was finding a particular captcha so indecipherable that I had to, in what could be called the supreme irony, take ChatGPT’s help to decode it. Maybe the way forward is to replace captcha with the same eternal question – “Do you like Sholay?”. And if the answer is negative, block, block, block. It’s almost certainly a robot. Or a warm body with a black heart. Either way it doesn’t deserve access…