Madhubala. Period.

By abhishek at 30 April, 2010, 11:30 pm

You look forward to some pleasant deviations in your mail box, especially at a time when you are stuck in the office at midnight trying to solve some software bug! When a friend mailed me the link to the masterpiece below (scroll down!), she’d turned my 5 minutes of that day into sheer bliss.

I wasn’t born in the Madhubala era; the closest that we came to “knowing” her was when our school teachers would hum songs that were picturised on her during our marathon picnic antaksharies to help us continue the game when we would run out of our database of Bollywood numbers.

I was 22 when I bumped into a ‘Madhubala memory’ for the second time. After a pretty eventful day “on the field” in the dry heat of Pune trying to convince my dealers to buy Air Conditioners, I entered my rented apartment ready to collapse into the gaadi (bed) which was placed strategically near the main door. But on that day, apart from the regular heaps of un-ironed clothes and a couple of washed socks, a DVD of the cult classic, Mughal-E-Azam lay on the bed.

My roommate, a parsee who was also 22 then was a fan of everything that came from the vocal cords of Hemant Kumar or any movie which had Madhubala in it. He walked into the living room and made a passionate plea in the name of Madhubala and everything about her to goad me into watching the movie. In the next few minutes, rather begrudgingly, I rebooted my laptop to ready myself for the 3 hour melodrama.

My irritation was short-lived. We were transfixed when Madhubala made her first appearance on the laptop monitor. My parsee mate fast forwarded to ‘Pyar Kiya toh…’ I was mesmerized.

As I saw the video 5 years after that beautiful day, the feeling was the same, probably only heightened. Her calculated emotions, the elegant defiance, the disdainful smirk all climax with her ghungroo creating music and her hands sculpting the air. Other actors on the screen merely happen to be there…

To quote my friend who sent me the link: “I’m sure you’ve seen it. This time, watch it; her head, her hands, her feet. They are moments of beautiful death.”