A humming word

As February passes like a soft breeze and we enter the simmering heat of March, it makes me wonder about love and Coronavirus. “ Choone se nahi pheltha hai ,” comes read a jocular post. Another reminded us how we, Indians, must not be scared of this virus: we can remove a tennis ball from a gutter, tap it and play with it. We can wash our hands off it yet it will be around much like love that we put on our guard around it and behave like it's coronavirus. Worse is love between people of the same sex. The most recent example for this is the film: Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan,  starring Ayushman Khurana and Jatinder Kumar directed by Aanand L. Rai. Albeit it’s a commercial hit, the film has made gay love a forced agenda. It portrayed how parents react in the most obscene and impractical way: they resort to avoiding the people involved to false attempts in suicide to questioning their own parenting to violent methods. Finally, they emotionally breakdown. The premise of...

Ayushmann has mastered the art of finding humour and poetry in the mundanity of life and its problems. Be it in a movie where women are trying hard to conceive and he, becoming the superhero to help them with his superpower called the sperm donation (Vicky Donor) or he is having a hard time to perform the act of making love (Shubh Mangal Savdhaan) or he, having a harder time, accepting that his parents can become parents again (Badhaai ho). He has nailed every role with his acting, singing and mainly, his dialect. It would come as no surprise that he has done it again with Bala.   The good old ingredients: a middle class family, a dominating leading lady and mashed with a problem that plagues us. In this case, hairfall. His life that alters after his hairfall problem begins (his transfer to another department, his breakup, and his rejection at proposals). The strands hugging the comb, tufts of hair in the gutter and the 100s of tips and tricks that he tries ( many with a bald pa...