Cooped up at home, our eyes are trained on the small boxes of our screens, where we appear to each other inside small boxes.
Illustration/Uday Mohite
To the person who sang “Lal lal hothon pe gori kiska naam hai” to Juhi Chawla during the online hearing of her 5G petition in the Delhi High Court: thank you.
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For months we have been living life locked in at so many levels. Cooped up at home, our eyes are trained on the small boxes of our screens, where we appear to each other inside small boxes. We repress our longing for hugs and faltugiri with friends. These last heartbreaking weeks, we’ve felt hemmed in by sadness and helplessness. How can we comfort the hurting, how much can we help in a failing system? Our efforts feel feeble. We feel guilty and unentitled to pleasure, when so many are suffering around us, because yes, our days are hard, but theirs are so much harder.
That naughty man deciding to crash the Delhi High Court Zoom hearing with Juhi Chawla songs floated to the top of our days like a mischievous bubble and popped open the air of our laughter. The cursor kept roaming across the Zoom boxes frantically, like the Yankees searching for the elusive Scarlet Pimpernel. Chawla sat looking extremely grave, and we cried tears of laughter. In our compressed lives, that uninhibited moment felt luxurious. The prankster was a Robin Hood of smiles.
Look, we had our reservations. I mean, why not “akele hain toh kya gham hai?” asked someone. Excuse me, I said, why not my favourite —Bambai se gayi Poona, Poona se gayi Patna?
Silliness is so irresistible, but we have to resist it so much. For instance, I know a young man called Devarsi (no, this is not a limerick) and ever since Danish Saith created the character of Bewarsi Kudka, it is very hard for me not to say Devarsi Kudka with a stupid grin to him, the way one did to schoolmates in corridors. Every time I get an email from my work associate, Shahzarin, my brain starts singing, “Shahzarin, bada rangeen hai vada tera”. Yeah, it’s silly, but the silly fun of ulta pulta abol tabol nonsense rhymes—what Bombaywallahs call bhankas. I cannot possibly act on these ridiculous impulses, partly because I would be seen as a crackpot, and partly because it may seem like I’m being disrespectful. But, I think it every time, giggling, and fear one day it will pop out, because, as Chawla herself famously said, “Kya karein control nahin hota”.
It’s not just the laughing—it was the kind of laughter. We are not short of memes, but they come trailing darkness and anger. Politically polarised jokes can be mean-spirited, even mocking someone’s weakness at times. The courtroom singing was at no one’s expense really. Just a jack-in-the-box of merriment, like those little boys running on the road, who, when they pick up speed suddenly cry out “Lollipop lagelu” apropos of nothing, making passersby laugh out loud—the generous hand and fellowship of fun. The moment was exactly like Chawla’s own dancing eyed zaniness in her songs.
Such nonsensical absurdities are only at the expense of decorum, the solemnity that accompanies power and procedure of institutions, and for the five minutes that we collapse into helpless laughter, the edifice of power and hierarchy too collapses and we feel, briefly, free. So bhai, whoever you are, meri side se thank you, really.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com
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