Mad About Movies

The two things anyone who meets Damini for the first time will find out about her are:

1    .     Her passion for movies

2    .     Her birthday.

Movies are an intrinsic part of who she is [this is not entirely surprising considering her father is a huge move buff]. Every evening she spends an hour watching a movie. The current favourite is watched repeatedly. Sometimes old hits are resurrected.

The Harry Potter phase

It started with the usual animation movies. The super heroes caught her fancy for a while, more for their costume than watching pleasure [we had to get her a Spider Man costume and Harry Potter’s wizarding paraphernalia].

  

But what she really likes to watch are Hindi movies:  we watch as dialogues, dance moves, entire scenes from films become a part of her life.

At one point she would introduce herself as Damini Kapoor much to the confusion of everyone as neither I nor my husband is a Kapoor. She had decided to change her surname after she took a shine to one of the characters in a movie she liked whose last name happened to be Kapoor. Naturally, introductions thereafter had to be followed up with this explanation. I was so tempted to call a press conference for everyone we knew so as to enlighten them all and save myself a lot of repetition.

She recently wrote a birthday card for her cousin Sakshi. We came to know from her mother that the card had been signed, with a flourish, ‘Damini Don’. This latest avatar stemmed from yet another movie character, this one played by her eternal favourite, Mr. Shahrukh Khan. She had rediscovered the movie and walked around the house for the next few weeks with a toy gun.

The only TV channels she watches, on the rare occasion that she watches TV at all, are music channels that play songs from Hindi movies and feature trailers of upcoming releases. The minute something catches her fancy, she’s off making plans to watch it in the theatres. But it doesn’t end there: she then needs to buy soundtrack, and she has caught on to the fact that we can download it onto our phones and other gadgets. Then they have to be loaded on to her iPod. And that’s not all: we now wait for the DVD to be released. Once it is purchased, the movie is watched repeatedly until she knows all the dialogues, the songs and until the rest of us can hear them in our nightmares. Or until the next flick come along.

Damini rarely watches any television, none of the cartoons for her, a movie’s on. There could be a case made against encouraging such a habit, especially where ‘Hindi movies’ are concerned.

Guess who?

Sometimes she is unable to differentiate real life from the story she is watching: she once packed a suitcase
and asked me to drive her to the airport. I asked her where she was going and she said she was going into the movie. She thought it was an actual place she could travel to and try as I might, I couldn’t convince her otherwise.

It can also get tedious watching her perform scenes and dances repeatedly, especially when we aren’t allowed to comment, talk or move our eyes off her until she says she is done.

There’s also the concern that she could pick up those semi obscene dance moves that so many songs feature. And really, there is nothing more obscene than a five year old doing ‘Munni Badnaam Hui’. Fortunately for us, Damini only apes the male hero. Then there is all the bad vocabulary that she is susceptible to picking up. That, one has to monitor constantly.

And we definitely did draw the line at getting a Sharukh Khan cake for her birthday.

Despite all the dangers, I am happy to say that we have had more positives come out of this entire celluloid fixation than negatives:

We have seen a lot of growth in language in Damini, especially Hindi. She also makes a conscious effort to read the English subtitles which is an opportunity to apply her reading skills. This way, it isn’t just an instrument of torture that all the adults in her life inflict on her.

There have also been many happy spinoffs:

One day, she expressed the desire to join dance classes, which she attended for a couple of years.

‘Rock On’ a movie about a rock band hit the screens and the next we knew, Damini wanted to be a drummer. We got her an authentic drum set for her birthday that year and she plays them every morning, slowly discovering rhythm. She is angling for a guitar and a mike next.

When Mr. Sharukh Khan decided to coach the Indian women’s hockey team in ‘Chak De,’ we developed a big interest in hockey. She constantly pestered me to take her to a hockey match, so one Sunday I took her to the hockey stadium where the various Kodava clubs in Bangalore regularly play against each other. That turned out to be a big disappointment as there were no girls in blue skirts and no Shahrukh Khan. But we bought a couple of hockey sticks that became a part of her routine in the evening. That persists to date.

We do regulate content and viewing time, but what could be potentially have been a mind-numbing activity for any person has, in her case, been a very productive past time that has actually helped her discover interests that add variety to her life. More importantly, she discovered them all by herself, without any compulsion from us. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s win- win.