Walking on The Moon

 These days the favorite and absorbing pass time is watching movies, I must be averaging about one and one half movies a day. This has been the routine since the past few months. Perhaps I want to make good of the times in the previous years when I rarely sat through a movie.

This may also be a liaison of a kind with motion picture that I once dreamed like Alice in her journey to wonderland. That was long ago, in the teens and thereabout, when fantasies and dreams were many and running berserk. However, all that withered and may even be said to have died still born. There was also a stricture from mother that she may be forced to consider me an outcast if I assay a career in the motion picture world. I could have chosen the field of movies, there were offers from a friend who later made his name as a producer and by the father of a couple of friends who also created a niche in the creative field of cinema. It was literally taking the road often traversed that happened , while on a journey in pursuit of freedom, in 1981, I was asked by a good chum on the train while traveling together, to join him in his hunt in the tinsel world in Madras. But I chose to journey further up north opting to think of the apparent comfort of a conventional placement.And he later became a person of reckon in the film world. Perhaps my choice of the blog picture of a mountaineer standing down far below in awe at the splendour and majesty of a peak has something to do subconsciously with the distance I now will never make in life. A haunting reminder of the many dreams that would stay as pipe-dreams, that, besides the realisation of one’s insignificance in the physical laws of Nature. This is when I would wish that the Hindu philosophy of life- that a second coming, a rebirth, a second chance, reincarnation were true. Well then, I can gain without much ado, a chance to make amends, (sigh)!

I’m afraid I dither and touch on aspects I did not intend to discuss here.

A movie, I watched, “A Walk on The Moon”, gave me a re-look at a subject I often wondered about seeking a definite explanation. Mans’ proclivity in tangoing with “la affaire amour” .Someone once alleged that it was men who displayed penchant for fornication. Though it is indeed a fact, but, is it not true that it takes two to tango and there has to be a woman too?

The movie has the mother of two and a woman in her late twenties intimately involving with a traveling garment vendor. The story is placed in the swinging sixties of the Woodstock era. She was aware of the repercussions that were to follow when if the liaison came into the open. But yet, she went further into it. The family is in ship wreck. And to add to the disaster, the eldest child, a girl comes of age and is driven by rage and anger when she notices her mother’s unshackled moments with her paramour at the Woodstock festival.  She hurls herself into destructive risqué with a teenage boy. The husband who travels often for work is devastated and possessed. The family is tossed about like in the tempest in the raging seas.

Man is not unaware of the upheavals that may blow like a cataclysmic whirl wind when illicit amour surfaces to glare. Apart from the fact that socially approved moral conduct does not have such relationships in its directory, man still serenade with danger. Besides the laws of physical intimacy decreed to man and woman, have we thought why people are more inclined to dangerous liaisons?  In this movie the woman becomes mother at the young age of seventeen ,yearns for marital freedom and to banish ennui from her life. So the reason goes.

Strongly asserting that I’m not advocating unrestrained warmth in men women relationship, I would like to know why the hullabaloo and bedlam about an amorous liaison, or in common parlance- a fling? It is certainly true that Nature has only one intention when metamorphosing the sexes-procreation. It is the consciousness of human mind and his thoughts that have placed restraints and dos and do nots in relationships between man and woman. And amongst them certainly men have de novo displayed penchant for seminal acts at any given time, a proclivity to lecherous habits. A dichotomy when compared with the male of other species. Why?

Trust and faithfulness, often the two characteristics that we hear of, that are comparable and as magnificent as chivalry. And which may in equal measure be applied to man and woman. It will be fascinating to quote here the conversation a friend once had with me on a related matter. “I would not hesitate to jump for a fling if a woman fancies a relationship and I long for one.” said the guy. I said, “Well that depends upon your luck and discretion, but what if your wife thinks on similar lines?” He was full of ire. “I’ll decapitate her,” he said.