Bheja Fry!

Yesterday night I watched the movie Bheja Fry. It’s an amazing movie about how an idiot can wreck havoc in life – and yet win it back for you with his simplicity and down-to-earth attitude.

What amazed me about the movie was that there were so many things that you can connect with each of us. It was almost like Dil Chahtha Hai where I am sure everyone of could have identified ourselves with the characters.

In one of the scenes in the movie, the main character irritates his co-passenger in a bus. He wants a window seat – it’s just that he likes it that way and when he wants to shift, he falls all over the next person, keeps on singing, does not care about his co-passengers comfort and keeps on irritating him with all the details.

This is so much like real life. I mean, how many times has it happened to you that you are travelling by bus, train, or a shared rickshaw and there is this one character who comes in with a devil-may-care attitude and you are left hapless, helpless with a horrible sense of premonition that the entire journey is going to be one big mess, something that will irritate you the whole day – something that you’ll think about and smile two months down the line!

Well, I used to work in Hyderabad and had to travel home to Pune often and sometimes to Bangalore. During these journeys, I’ve encountered enough of this rather exotic kind of sub-species of homo-sapiens (well, I am not so sure that these creations of God rightly belong to the same species as me, but, let’s keep the argument simple and grudgingly assume it to be true!).

So, there was this female who was travelling in a KSRTC bus from B’lore to Hyderabad. She suddenly gets up and starts to shout at her really dumb-looking passenger. He looks like the type of a guy who would drool at heroines in a movie theatre when the lights were out, but, who’d never utter a squeak in front of a real female. Beside him is this amazon of a woman. If she were the last surviving female on earth, I am sure her temper would have fended off any unfair advances and the species would have gone the way of dinosaurs.

Anyway, coming back to the journey, this female gets up and starts to fight with the conductor. She says that she is a single girl. Girl! Girl! Girl! Girl! (The word resonated multiple times around the bus – think of it like the Ekta Kapoor’s serial where a sexy looking female announces that she’s going to become the ma of a guy who’s strayed from the path of fidelity).. Well, after the initial resonation of her claim to be a girl (My God, I can’t believe she said that – if she were a girl then, Lalita Pawar would be a teen!) had died down, the conductor went to her place. With a mouth full of paan he asked, “En re? Enu problem?” (What madam? What’s the problem?). The girl(??) with a melodious voice that could shatter diamond exclaimed that she was a single, unmarried woman and it was not appropriate for her to sit with some unidentified male beside her during a night journey. “Oh yeah, she’s right,” I thought. “After all, what sort of a demented man would want to spend a night beside such a shrew?”

Well, her question stumped the conductor. I am not sure what shocked him more. Whether it was the girl (huh?) who complained, instead of the guy or if her sudden inappropriateness – after all, she looked like a woman who could fend off the entire battalion of male soldiers, if need be. After a minute’s silence (probably in homage of all the guys who had been slain by her attitude and words, and a moment of silent prayer to get some kind of other-wordly strength), the conductor asked her what he could do. Hmm.. this guys was intelligent. If you can’t think, don’t. Let the problem creator be the problem solver. Good management funda.

So, the amazon-girl replied that she’d like to have a female sitting beside her for the journey or the seat should be left vacant – rather more like, half the remaining seat beside her should either be unoccupied or should be filled up by a timid lady, who was perching on the edge of the seat so that she could get up and run at the first sign of any volcanic activity beside her.

Well, the conductor was now in a big quandary. There were only two other females in the bus – one a mother of a 6-7 year old and the other one looked like a newly married girl, who was cuddling and molly-coddling with her new hubby. He was now in a dharma-sankat – whether to separate a newly-wedded couple or to drag a mother from her son. The conductor approached both the women and both refused. The newly married wanted to be beside her hubby. The mother wanted to be beside her son. So, he went back and reported to the amazon-lady that she had no other choice but to maintain status-quo as there were no other seats free.

The amazon was now in her flow. “How dare you make me sleep beside this guy?” she rhetorically asked. The guy had shrunk to a state of a miserable vermin that was about to be trapped and beaten! The conductor was growing deperate too. He went out and spit the paan. I am sure it was quite symbolic. But, this did not help him resolve the problem. The lady was still on her feet and refusing to let the bus move. Just when he was about to give up, our hero beside the amazon-lady, in a sudden sense of intelligence went to the mother of the kid and pleaded with her. Ostensibly, he’d probably have said that the choice was between reaching Hyderabad or not reaching Hyderabad at all. Anyway, there was a short interchange and finally, the mother left her son and exchanged her seat. The guy seemed to be so relieved that he treated the kid as his own son – he left the kid sleep side-ways. The kid, apparently, a football player in the making spared no efforts to try out free-kicks in his dreams. Despite this, our hero spent a happy time, and stared out at the vacant earth on the dark night. He had a small smile on his face. I am sure, it would have been the most heroic thing he could have done. After all, he’d saved our damsel (as it were) in distress.

As to our amazon, she thundered and rumbled at the ineptitude of the bus system and finally sat down. The bus started to move and the sill Govinda-Khadar Kahn movie resumed. Every body tried to watch it with keen interest as they were worried that any surreptitious glance at our damsel would be misconstrued as an act of filrtation and she’d send the disgraceful male to a state of perdition and probably make him sit in the luggage compartment.

And so, the journey contined….

Well, this was just one of the best instance of a passenger coming with a devil may care attitude. There are many others that I’ve probably written elsewhere. But, the movie sort of rekindled my thoughts over these past episodes. I am sure that it is not the end of it. Every time I go on a long journey, I end up having some such experience. Not sure if it is just me or if everyone of you too face similar issues… Maybe, God likes my blogs and wants me to experience it all and blog about it! :)