I have a confession to make! I love hindi movies, actually I’m crazy about them. Long before the kids of my age could recognize even their close relatives I could recognize all the heroes and heroines of the silver screen and long before they could tell one movie from the other I was critically analyzing them (the movies that is) and assigning them one to four stars as per my ratings. The moment I heard about a new movie I would start pestering my parents to take me for it. Soon they could not take it anymore and gave me the freedom to watch them along with my school friends. I remember Dharam Veer being the first movie that I watched along with my school friends. I must have been 8 years or so at that time but the thrill of watching a movie in theater without my parents in view made me feel like a grown up man.

I was so obsessed with movies that I would actually dream about them in my sleep. I remember one night watching ‘Don’ in my dreams and that too before I had watched the movie. It started of with me watching Amitabh on the screen and God knows when I got sucked into the plot, became Amitabh himself and started dodging bullets and chasing badies. Another confession, I am a sucker for suspense thrillers and court room dramas. I was on the edge of my seat while Sunil Dutt dragged a sack through the passageway of the court with red colored water dripping in ‘Waqt’. I almost skipped a beat when Rahman opens the cupboard and the dummy falls over him in the same movie. I was frozen to my seat while watching ‘Kanoon’, one of the best thrillers and court room dramas ever made in India, starring Ashok Kumar and Rajendra Kumar. Somehow I get great thrills when one lawyer says to the other "Me-lord Mere Qabil dost adalat ka waqt zaya kar rahe hain, is kahani ka is muqaddme se koi talluque nahin hai" and the other one cuts him short by saying "talluque hai me-lord bahut gahra talluque hai". Finally judge saheb concludes "aisa ageebo-gareeb muqaddma is adalat mein pahli baar aaya hai".

I like to watch all sorts of films good or bad, old or new, commercial or parallel, family drama or social etc. I get so fascinated by characters or plots so typical to hindi movies. Now, who else could think of such characters who make ‘out of the world’ plans to rip the hero off his ‘karodon kee jaidad’. I was bowled over by the Character played by Prem Chopra in ‘Woh Kaun Thi’ who made such bizarre plans to make Manoj Kumar to go cuckoo in his head for his (Manoj Kumar’s) inherited property. Gosh! With that acumen and planning if he was to start his own business, he would surely earn much more than what Manoj Kumar couldn’t even imagine in his wildest dreams. Such characters, mostly played by Pran, Prem Chopra, Gulshan Grover, Mohan Joshi etc., spend their life time working as managers of some estate or something similar while coveting the owner’s property as well as his beautiful daughter.

Which film maker (not from bollywood) could even think of a plot in which the villain tries to marry the heroine forcibly, literally on a gun point. Can someone be so inane to believe that once ‘saat-pheras’ are done the heroine will give in and accept him as his ‘pati parmeshwar’? Now that’s what I call a respect for values and traditions. For a ‘hindustani naari’ her ‘pati’ is her ‘parmeshwar’ and it does not matter if she was forcibly married to the devil and it does not matter if ‘he’ is the person who killed her father, raped her sister, had beaten the shit out of her boy friend and in every way is the worst person she had ever laid her eyes on. Once a ‘pati’ always a ‘pati’.

Another very interesting subject that always fascinates me is the Villain’s (specially Ajit’s) den. Imagine this character giving specifications to his architect "OK, I want a room in which the walls, covered with spikes, should close in on pressing a button. I can use it to scare the hero by making his mother or sister sit in there. Then I want a room with hidden nozzles which will fill the room with some poisonous gas when desired. This will be used to catch the hero or the heroine or both unaware. Then I want a pit in the center filled with some acid or burning coal or melted wax or crocodiles or whatever. I’ll hang the hero on a swing just above the pit to force him to sign the property papers or give me the secret formula or a micro film whichever applicable". Every time I watch such den in a movie I get this instant urge to try on the different buttons on the panel myself where numerous light bulbs flicker in different color and intensity.

Every time I watch the heroine or her brother dangling from some tall building or a hill in the climax scene my heart takes a leap. I feel quite relieved when somehow the villain ends up falling down from the same point. Every time the hero is falsely indicted and goes to the jail I wait for him to meet the ‘dada’ of the jail who would be sitting with two sidekicks (one of them inevitably played by a bald fellow called Manmauji) giving him a massage. Then the scene of the meal distribution where this dada picks on the weakest looking fellow followed by hero bashing up ‘dada’ to pulp and at this point I whistle out loud. Every time I see the hero tied to a pole while a time-bomb ticking nearby I chew my nails off. Thankfully there is a bottle or a knife lying somewhere handy. Every time a doctor comes out after examining a badly wounded hero or his mother and says "choubees ghante tak kutch nahin kaha ja sakta" I secretly wipe off my tears. And of course the classic scene where the doctor un-curls the bandages off the hero’s eyes and says "ab dheere dheere ankhe kholiye" I am on the edge of the seat thinking "will he or won’t he" and the camera goes out-of-focus to soft-focus to focus, phew! what a relief. I cry unabashedly when I see the final reunion of long lost brothers or mother and son in the end and the comedian clicks a photograph of the happy family.