Multilplex madness

This appeared in the Mumbai Mirror September

You don’t expect to see fluorescent yellow and pink palm trees on the industrial stretch of the Andheri Malad Link Road. But they’re there – little beacons of festivity in a road crammed with one room garages, industrial parts shops and other unaesthetic nuts and bolts of our smoothly mechanized lives.

I like the trees. They make showy promises of glitz and glamour, never mind that they’re window dressing for ‘Neelam Bar and Restaurant’ type of joints. Like their larger and more showy avatars halfway across the globe – those myriads of flashing figures that light up Las Vegas. It’s always lights and showtime in that man made fantasy fairyland though its set in the unlikeliest of spaces, surrounded by barren stretches of the Nevada desert.

And its showtime here too, off the fume filled and pot holed Andheri Malad Road. More pink palm trees, and steps up to the greatest American temple of all – the Mall Multiplex. Yes, its glittering glass and chrome – No, it doesn’t have the art deco of Metro or the history of Eros. And sue me – but I love it – the go carting on the ground floor, the book and music shop on the first floor, the Coffee Shop downstairs and the smell of Caramel pop corn in the air...

Here’s where I brought my five year old daughter Aleya to attend her first school friend’s birthday party – the class enthralled by a little orange clownfish scouring the seas in search of his father. Later, after cake and burgers in the food court on the second floor, each child trooped home with a return gift of a little gold fish in a bag full of water.

And here’s the Café Coffee Day I hung out at for almost a fortnight. Perfecting near impossible jugglery of children’s school pick ups and playtimes, in between watching Francois Ozon’s compelling drama of creativity,’ The Swimming Pool’. Or the Croatian ‘The Horseman’ where tribesman war with each other as the Ottoman Empire collapses and a Muslim Romeo falls in love with a Christian Juliet. Another day it was Walter Salles touching tale ‘Central Station’ where a lonely middle aged woman and a little boy traverse miles of Brazilian highways in a Quixotean quest. Peter’s Greenaway’s intriguingly titled ‘The Cook, The Thief, his wife and her Lover’, a viscerally revolting tableaux of gourmand excess set in a Parisian restaurant, love and rebellion in Argentina’s coal mines , Shwaas, Black Friday and Amu… All at 60 rupees a film and best of all ,no traffic traumatized long and winding roads to YB Chavan auditorium in town.

Did anybody say anything about the cultural constraints of suburbia? I’m not listening - for this is definitely home delivered heaven .