Night Thoughts-II

Night is such a weird time. After midnight, in the absolute silence of the dark (and perhaps the occasional snore and grunt of the roommate), suddenly one finds oneself in that mood that we, humans so easily call nostalgia. Maybe it’s not just nostalgia for me, it’s that melancholic mood, one when memories do come running by, but more than the memories themselves, one just wants to experience all those emotions that one did… and to feel surprised and full again. And what better, in the face of such craving, than the random lines from books that made one laugh and cry for good times and bad, not respectively.

I’ll tell you something that’s not better, but as equally wonderful- one’s favourite movies.

And so in the night, I started doing it, opening random movies and watching them- those scenes that are never quite over.

First came Butter, ah!! How I never tire of watching that one. Whether it’s the stripper buying knives for Destiny, by sacrificing her ‘work clothes’ or the melted face of the baby, carved in to butter, that movie always instils hope, and is unfailingly the first one that I inadvertently open.

To Kill A Mockingbird has a long scene that I would watch in my above said mood- the movie itself. But if that will not be possible, then the opening scene, of the kid humming to herself while ‘organising’ her ‘toys’ is good enough for me.

For all those days I spent romancing in the sun-filled streets and the divine beaches at Pondicherry, I go to Eat Pray Love. Plenty of connections there, as it so happens that I bought my copy of that book from those very same sun-filled streets. The last scene of Javier Bardem walking to the docks to meet Julia Roberts, in his sandals and loose cotton pants, nothing makes me cry for Pondy like that one does.

And how can I not mention Morgan Freeman’s ‘One hundred and ten’ in Million Dollar Baby, or Bane’s speech in The Dark Knight Rises or Joseph Gordon Lewitt drawing the skyline of Los Angeles onto Zooey Deschanel’s arm? Or the scene from The King’s Speech where the tutor entertains the King and the Queen at his house and his wife walks in?  And perhaps one of the most romantic scenes in movies, Sean Penn clicking James Franco’s pictures in Milk? Remi sniffing the mushroom fried with cheese, that makes you wish for one?              The boys flying out of the window in James Barrie’s mind in Finding Neverland? Or the ‘mom’ in The Blind Side? Or Bellatrix’s laugh at her freedom in The Order of the Phoenix…. I can just go on… anyways, the point is that medley of random movie scenes at midnight is sometimes as revelatory as nirvana, shows what one wants and what one misses. However, that should be no reason not to find more beauty in the now, to write about at another midnight, when thoughts are hard to come by in the midst of a roommate’s grunts.

Carpe diem!!!