I love those 70s movies they show on TV. What I really like in them is the lifestyle the heroine leads! So, there is this pretty, young girl, with an equally-pretty friend who hang out in a huge mansion, wearing pretty sarees.

They come bounding down the ornate staircase and ask their rich fathers for small favours like

‘Can I go to Shyama’s house to play badminton?’

or

‘Can we go to the College picnic?’.

To which, the rich father, says, ‘Yes’, adoringly and gives them a wad of notes.

They, then, call their driver, whose name is ‘Hukum Singh’,

‘Hukum Singh, gaadi nikalo’

Hukum Singh pulls into the portico in a huge car and they drive out. The father watches with continued adulation in his moist eyes.

Of course, later then the father discovers that it was Shyam, not Shyama and that the college picnic was,actually, a date with Prem Chopra, he has a heart attack. If he is Balraj Sahni or Nazir Hussain, the heart attack enactment scores a perfect 10.

Those guys were really so good at it!

In fact, in real life, when they, actually, had that unfortunate attack, unconfirmed reports say the doctors watched, mesmerized, clapped, and shouted ‘cut’ at the end. On that cue, it is believed the bereaved family members cut their throats.

I often dream of a life in a movie like that. I am wearing a pretty saree, with a tinkling key chain tucked at my thin waist (Don’t snigger, I SAID it was a dream), and skip down the stairs in a dainty scamper.

The dream ends here.

There is no mansion here!

While there are stairs, they do not permit that kind of rapid descent.

This is because they end in a wall, smashing into which could render one incapable of any further dreams about ‘pretty sarees’ or ‘thin waists’. What is more annoying is that there is a golf kit at the end of those stairs, mocking me in the face, seeming as if it would break into a song: ‘Main tulsi tere aangan ki, koi nahin tere sajan ki…’

Even if I gloss over the limitations of the house, I face a lot of constraints hiring ‘Hukum Singh’. This is because I stay in Bangalore. There are no ‘Hukum Singhs’ here. And, if I call out,

Nagababu Subramanyam, Gaadi nikalo,

There are two problems,

1. It does not sound anywhere close to the preferred statement, if you know what I mean

2. Nagababu Subramanyam will fetch my watch, unless I translate it in Kannada or team my verbal instruction with sign language, which we have learnt to do over the years.

Talking of that lifestyle I envy, I would love to be part of those party songs : the ones in which one person sings a heart-rending song with bitter, accusatory lyrics, staring at another person of a DIFFERENT gender (remember, we are in the 70s). The other party people are either brain-dead or have smoked pot since they don’t ‘get it’.

Instead, they listen with appreciation, and even break into waltz at times, while the two people in the afore-mentioned conflict, cry copiously while singing, bang their heads into the bannister of the ornate staircase, and finally faint.

The party songs in my current lifestyle are antakshari songs : a game that degrades, after a while, since most songs end with ‘ha’ and not many songs start with ‘ha’.

At that point, people modify songs like ‘Noorie noorie’ making it ‘Ho Noorie Noorie’. Fist-fights ensue.

Ok, let me make my dream more reasonable: maybe, just that, when I ring the doorbell, it is opened by a smiling ‘Ramu kaka’ who asks a senseless question with an obvious answer :

‘Aa gayi, bitya?’

which again, denotes that either Ramu kaka is brain dead or has been smoking pot.

Or maybe, he is Arnab Goswami in disguise.

In reality, when I ring the doorbell, there is sound of a mad scamper, with pushing and shoving involved. These are my two kids trying to outrun each other to open the door. The race usually, end in a tie. So it is, instead, resolved by a fist-fight at the door. There is name-calling, pulling of hair and articles of clothing. Nikki presents data, in futile attempt to resolve it amicably,

‘Prithvi, you opened the door last time also, remember? It’s my chance now’.

There is a sound of a thud of some sort. Either she has been hit with a plastic racquet or she has fallen down, unassisted. You see, she is not too nimble on her feet, to put it mildly.

All this while, I wait outside patiently. Maybe I should get myself a new phone on which I can watch one of ‘em 70s movies during this long, long wait.

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