Flying back from Singapore to San Francisco
The flight from Singapore to San Francisco is, in total, 16 hours including a one hour stop in Hong Kong. There are tons of movies and things to watch, and I got super lucky with legroom and empty seats on this leg (yay!).
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| legroom was fantastic on this flight (my feet) |
Bollywood movies and my epiphany
I never watched Bollywood growing up. I had no idea what the value of these films might be. In fact, I actively avoided them. First of all, they were in Hindi, so I didn't appreciate the linguistic challenge. Further to that, there was no access to Bollywood films until the late 90's (DVD) so how would I have seen them anyway?
However, at some point (maybe when Indians started marrying non-Indians), Bollywood style dancing and the whole wedding culture became more popular because let's face it, they are fun things. Bollywood dancing is a fantasy and lends itself to exaggeration and fantasy, much like American television and movie culture. It is showmanship. In addition, North Indian style weddings (see both 2010 and 2015 blogs) are outrageously showy. They are the furthest possible thing from low-key.
Maybe I should get to the point. It's harder than I thought.
For the first half of the flight, to Hong Kong, I watched "Lost in Translation". Although I'd seen this movie before, it is so subtle and thoughtfully constructed and acted that I'd wanted to watch it again. So I did, and I loved it just as much as I loved it before. The gist of the story focuses on connecting with another person in a way that impacts and even changes how you view the world and other people. Both the main characters are married, and perhaps not entirely emotionally satisfied at the moment they meet, yet they show remarkable restraint and openness to the unfolding emotions they experience (ok, I'm sure everyone has seen this movie, so why am I analyzing it here). It's just a good movie about people and their emotions.
For the second half of the flight (after I slept for 5 hours), I opted to watch a Hindi movie I'd seen the preview for a while ago. It is called luka chuppi, which means "hide and seek". This movie is about a young man and woman who basically fall in love, but the girl doesn't want to get married, she just wants to live with the guy. The guy, on the other hand, is super concerned about her societal standing if she opts to live in with him because the families would absolutely freak out. Like most Bollywood movies, it was hopelessly convoluted and detailed, so I'm scaling up in saying that the movie depicted with great accuracy what would happen if the girl ventured out on this living-with-guy relationship without marriage in the picture. In short, the social standing and structural fabric of the family would be destroyed irrevocably.
In my American mind, this is so ridiculous. Destroyed irrevocably. Really? Is it really that bad? But the movie was so good at showing the audience (with songs too!) how freaky-outy your average middle-class Indian family behaves. And how everyone is in everyone's business for entirely selfish reasons sometimes. And my epiphany was that this explains so much to me about the differences between Indian parents and American parents. If this movie had come out 40 (ok, maybe even 50) years ago, then it would have been in line with some American lines of thought (we're still more liberal).
While I was contemplating this, I was also flashing back to things like middle school, high school, and even college, and realizing how impossibly isolated I was from someone like my mother (my dad was always exceedingly liberal), who represents the same thinking I was watching from the families in the movie. It is unbelievable since she'd been in the States for so long, but you can take a person out of the culture, but you can't take the culture out of them entirely. She never subscribed to American styles of dating and marriage and insisted that arranged marriages were more realistic in terms of what has to happen in a marriage, which she saw as participants putting up with lots of crap. (Any marriage involves putting up with crap, by the way...some people can do it, and some can't, and the fall out is about 50%). I think arranged marriage is not such a great idea these days. The minute you educate a girl, she should choose her own partner. Period. No exceptions. Arranged marriages are about controlling women. However, any educated woman who had an arranged marriage is probably one of the strongest and most willful women you will ever meet.
I fear my epiphany sounds silly now that I've written it out, but I seriously have never completely viewed my mom with this lens. Now that I can put the language together, and see the context fully, it makes sense. At least I lived to resolve it in my mind.
