What I miss about watching films in the pre-multiplex era are the cinema theatres with hanging fans, stale yellow popcorn in small packets, cold puffs with a mysterious stuffing and the pervading smell of urine. But I miss most the Gandhi Class, a sacred place which was the site for discovering adulthood, romance and a love for films.
Gandhi Class was the first few rows in the theatre. Without exception, those who sat in the last rows in the classroom were inevitably in the first rows here. It was the cheapest way of entry and it marked a clear iron curtain between the prosaic middle class and the revolutionary Gandhi Class citizens. Almost as a corollary, we were all scrawny kids in loose pants and shirts, with an awkwardness of teenage rebellion which found a silent expression in these front rows. Our survival in that class depended on our capacity to whistle loudly and, if necessary, to loudly make lewd remarks without being ashamed of doing so.
More than anything else, the Gandhi Class taught us that films are never about moving images alone. Whether it was Rajkumar, Sivaji or Amitabh, they were about the ways in which these actors inhabited our lives, dreams and imagination. These films were not about stories or even these actors, they were all about the safari shirts we would wear or the step-cut which we would discuss in the barber shop. For the Gandhi Class citizens, we were the film and the images on the screen were only 2D versions of our dreams.
Most of all, Gandhi Class made us — at least for those few dark moments inside the theatre — autonomous adults who could collectively think of unthought things. Outside the theatre, we were awkward teens running between being difficult inside the home to being silent inside the classroom. But when we sat in the Gandhi Class with money collected through various nefarious means, when we looked with awe at those boys around us who smoked like they were in a film scene, we began to believe that we did indeed have control over our lives and that hopes and dreams did have an happy end with a song or two thrown in between.
My love for philosophy must have begun in those dark theatres waiting for those intermittent flashes of colour and light. Everything we believed about the world outside was destroyed when the lights went down. Perception was no longer three-dimensional and suffused with depth; it was nothing more than the dance of light beams on a flat white screen — sometimes with stains on them. Love was not about the jitters of talking to flesh-and-blood girls in the neighbourhood; it was only a matter of casually leaning on the tree and singing a song.
To be heroic was not to be born a superman but only to be an auto driver with a good heart. And to be poor actually was not the worst state of existence to be in.
And now: the Gandhi Class has been replaced by the gold class, sofa class, premium class, executive class and so on, each of these classes being classier than the other. Popcorns come in tubs and in genetically mutated sizes and shapes. The air smells of food and oil, and some lost waft of perfumes from moving bodies. Whistles have been replaced by frantic hellos on call-dropping phones, scrawny kids by plump, over-eating children. Cigarettes have once again been banished into the screen and security guards do body search, not for weapons but for chewing gums. Most importantly, that feeling of rebellion on those hard seats of the Gandhi Class now snuggles lazily on comfortable cushioned seats.
Ironic that now there is more egalitarianism within the theatre but greater inequality outside it. At least in our Gandhi Class, there was no pretension to equality within and without, and we knew, every time we walked in or out of the theatre, that life and movies were really two sides of a mangled coin.
(Sundar Sarukkai is a freelance philosopher based in Bengaluru. email: sarrukai1@yahoo.com)
