Before I get into the movie, I have to tell you a little story about myself, because it kind of explains how I got so interested in Hindi cinema in the first place.
My father is Pakistani, with roots tracing back to the Punjab of India, and my mother German and Mexican, born and raised in the U.S.(as I was). When I was four, we actually lived in Karachi for six months, and the music,language, clothing and food lingers in some of my earliest memories.My parents divorced shortly after my return to the United States and I had no contact with my birth father for 20 years.
As a child, I often found it hard to fit in because I wasn't full German, wasn't full Mexican, wasn't full anything...and I really didn't know any Pakistanis. I always felt like a piece of me was missing, like a part of myself was taboo in my family because my mother had been hurt by my father and didn't have very pleasant memories of Pakistan. One day, I was up early watching Saturday morning cartoons and came across a song from a Hindi movie. I don't know how I knew it was similar to my dad's language, but I did. There was an eerie sense of familiarity in the music which I found strangely comforting. I'm not sure why, but this song of a woman dancing around a lounge stuck in my head for years....
20 years later, when I met my father and his wife Uzma, it was like a whole new cultural experience for me...But I loved every minute of it! Finally, I could learn and piece together the part of my heritage that had been a mystery for so many years...We looked through pictures of my family in Pakistan, ate Uzma's yummy cooking, and sipped chai. Uzma even sent me home with some of the black powdery eyeliner my mother loved so much from Pakistan! Today I have a nice relationship with them, visiting them in New York every now and then.
Ok, so back to Bollywood. It all started when a clerk at a gas station had poor enough eyesight to tell me I looked like Zeenat Aman(Now that I've seen her, I'm very,VERY sad to say I look nothing like her. I'm not even going to lie to you!). Curious, I called Uzma(You have to remember that I never felt like I fit in any kind of cultural group, so I was pleased to see that somebody had actually treated me like I should know who Zeenat Aman was, rather than looking at me like, "Oh, I wonder what she's mixed with?"), and of course she laughed and said we may have similar hair. But she did find it cute, so she promised to search through her movies and send me one with Zeenat Aman in it...
I'm totally not going to paste a pic of myself here because you would just laugh too hard...
But it actually took me awhile to watch this movie. I was interested, but not enough to place it at the top of my priority list(at that time, I actually did have a life). Finally, one night I popped it in...and guess what....
The first song in Laawaris was the same one I had seen on tv so many years ago! Now what are the odds of that? Of all the hundreds of Hindi films there are, what are the chances of my ever coming across that random song again? And to add to the irony, the movie was sort of about a man meeting his birth father and coming to terms with his identity...Freaky....
I wish I could say more about the movie, but to be honest, I had a hard time paying attention. The scenes would jump from one random place to the next(Where did Zeenat Aman come from anyways? She just sort of appeared... and her and the lead actor were suddenly singing on mountaintops), and the subtitles were really hard to follow. And is it just me, but do some of the scenes seem like they go on forever?
I would really like to re-watch this and re-post, because now being a Bollywood lover and more used to the swing of things, I would probably be a lot more forgiving and enjoy the movie more!
Text (c) 2007 Nida Nazir Bitten By Bollywood
