Urooj Latika : Series – Part I

Seldom do you fall in love that makes you so brave that you forget the world and its worldliness. The love that strips all of your cleverness and ends up making you look like a naive infant who has just taken a new birth. Is it not the same? Falling in love, is it not like taking a new birth.. Because everything changes, doesn’t it? The world seems new, the people seem new, the seasons seem new. 

Urooj lived to act, and acted to live. When he saw ordinary people coming to life while playing larger than life roles, singing whilst playing a guitar, chasing the goons, lending hand from a moving train, spending years in jail for someone else’s dignity, a world inside him churned. He wanted to be those people. He wanted to surprise someone with tea because he saw that in a film. He wanted to be someone’s Raj, Prem, Rohit or Sanju. He wanted to live multiple lives, play different characters with different other characters at varied locations. If he was Raj Malhotra from DDLJ with someone, he wanted to be Sanjay Thapar from JTWS with someone else. He wanted his life to be an amalgamation of various films. 

Latika knew this, and she helped Urooj to live the various characters. Sometimes she weaved their meetings into different-different scenarios, like, meeting like strangers, or behaving like two different people who are complaining about their respective partners, or sometimes creating a scurrilous setting for both of them.

Why did Latika do this? For life was a film for Latika too. But above all, all her life she wanted a great love story. This could be the cumulative effect of all the films, music, serials that she had been consuming since her birth. She thought in film narratives, spoke in film dialogues, had a background score ready in mind for every situation, and daily routine ran in set montages. The lines between real and reel often blurred with each other befogging her to wonder if she was the protagonist of just her own story or if she indeed was the heroine of everyone else’s story too. The latter thought faded away as she grew up. The film sets, costumes, song sequences were negotiable but what was non-negotiable, to have a love story like Raj & Simran. Did it sound too cliched? She could not do better because Salim-Anarkali, Princess Anne-Joe Bradley, Rick-Ilsa, Amit-Chandni, Aman-Moina, they did not have a happily ever after. She wanted that. 

But, unfortunately the happy films that showed ‘happily ever after’ did not show anything post that because maybe you could not really execute it? If Urooj wanted to be a hero of various films, Latika dreamt of being a heroine of the most amorous film. When she used to travel in the city, seeing couples holding hands, kissing, hugging or celebrating a date together, she always used to wonder if she would ever live something like this. She always wanted to. 

A romance so passionate that it ignites fire in hearts, a love so pure that it makes the world absolutely beautiful, a relationship so gratifying that you want to thank your stars every minute, every second. A lover who feels like Yash Chopra’s music, SRK’s signature move, Christmas eve, warm afternoon on a winter day, or a warm bed after a full-day shoot!

When she saw Amitabh running towards Rekha in the tulip field, or when Shah Rukh gave his hand to Kajol, when Hrithik and Amisha got stranded in a deserted island, when Aamir and Preity explored a new city, she wanted it, she wanted it all. And that is what she found in and with Urooj. A movie where she lived daily. What Urooj’s stupefaction never realized was that Latika gave him the opportunity to play a different character everyday. They were together because their foundation was laid on something they both loved the most. Films. They could talk about anything under the sun but when it came to films, they thought alike, spoke alike, felt alike. And, there was so much to share!

Films united them indeed. But Urooj was oblivious to the fact that Latika gave him numerous opportunities to act! And as he was bound to act each and every time, he was also the most liberated. When together, he was bound with liberation. But Urooj was a little obtuse to realize the importance of Latika and what he shared with her.