Cinema: The Fading Magic of the Silver Screen

 **July 2006**

In small towns and cities, there was a time, till the early nineties at least, when the quotient of budding youthfulness in country lads was measured by their contrived, stealthy, hard-fought escapades to the cinema halls.

Cinema then fashioned the ways and modes of bravery, for gangs of youth fought with knives and hockey sticks over tickets and seats inside.

Cinema was the harbinger of fashion, of love, of relations, of ideology, of knowledge, and whatnot.

Entertainment on television was in its infancy.

A cinema hall with broken panelling, decimated chairs by overenthusiastic audiences, its interior crammed with peanut shells and other discards from eatables, presented a cramped cabinet of adequate entertainment, replacing all the past elements of entertainment like theatre, visits to fairs, festivals, magic shows.

Film stars had as big a persona as those figures on the mammoth screens.

Sitting with their smallness from the small places, people, abandoning all their egos and authorities, looked spellbound, clapped at favourite dialogues, booed at and yelled at the villains, sang and danced to the tunes with the stars, with the heroes and heroines, whistled, threw obscenities at the characters with negative shades, passed livid, sexy remarks at the heroines.

And during the interval, the canteen inside got swarmed like a thirsty pack of cattle around a tiny, muddy waterhole in a desert.

In excitement, who cared for the cheapness and staleness of patties, snacks and other articles of eatery at exorbitant prices in the cinema canteen?

Alas, within a decade, all that is gone with the wind.

Cable TV has turned the tables head-on.

The small screen has hit the big one with such impunity that the behemoth is tottering to its fall.

People have it all on their small screens—24 hours, 365 days in a year.

Many illustrious cinema halls are rarely able to meet the running costs.

Some have closed.

Those who still stand in the fray, they bear the ignominy and ridicule of vacant seats in the first show of the best movie.

And mind you, the canteen!

The canteenwallah is the most pathetic figure these days.

Out of a dozen-odd spectators, very rarely somebody comes forward for a thing to buy.

"The cinema is dying," I heard a canteen keeper saying with sadness.

The cinema is dying, at least in our town.

I agree with him.