Intruder Alert - (Prelude to the Tail ended War)

Of the greatest movies in cinematic history, Malayalam cinema I believe has churned the most classic and critically acclaimed masterpieces. Innumerable state, national and international awards have been won by them even when other movie industries were just coming of age.

However with all due respects to the appreciation of such cinemas, it was very difficult for a large group of people to see and appreciate such movies as the underlying technical aspects of how they have been made could not  be perceived by them. This is your everyday ordinary masala movie watcher who has only one agenda in watching any movie. Kill time!

So, once during school we had this group of masala watchers who had huddled in the class as one of them was talking about how these ‘master piece’ Malayalam movies usually are;

“It’s an old tile roofed house inside of a coconut tree farm. An old man is sitting in his rocking chair in the front porch and you can hear the faint creaking sound of his chair. In the background was a very low sound of a moving pulley wheel of a well... in the backyard. His aged wife is slowly taking water from the well. The camera zooms through the front door, passing through dimly lit hall and then through the backyard door just showing the frail woman’s hands pulling the rope. Suddenly, the camera turns to the front side of the house and you can see a cow walking into the front yard to graze the long grown grass as it moos ‘Mmaaaaa’.

The camera turns around again to the backyard and the lady stops pulling the rope and slowly turns around and says ‘arriii’.

The camera runs to the front of the house as if it’s following the sound of ‘ari ‘ going through to the front of the house. The camera stops at the legs of the rocking chair and the rocking stops. The man’s face is zoomed in as he slowly opens his eyes looking straight at the camera. He inches forward from his backrest and with a suppressed emotion opens his mouth slowly and utters, ‘shoo’ ‘shoo’”

The entire group just burst out guffawing to that presentation. My sister used to enact this with her friends from the neighborhood too and would have a hearty laugh session. 

While the above scene can never be surpassed in real life, back in my school days it used to be an almost a similar scene in my house especially when the whole family used to sit together while watching DD2 on tv. The lights are off and you can see all the faces showing the nava-rasas while the flickering light of the tv screen is on their faces.

This is the time when all the well known intruders with their tails/ whiskers/ soft squeaks scurry along the edges of the wall. The only thing that you would see is all of us very slowly moving our eyes... simultaneously... towards the direction of the squeak and then very slowly moving back the line of sight...simultaneously... back to the flickering tv screen. 

This is our masterpiece of being dead ‘Alert’ for an ‘Intruder’.

- A Citizen

                    *Contd in… Tail ended War!