So this is what is supposed to happen when Tony Leung, who has successfully reduced women all over the world to a quivering mass of hormones, comes to India for the first time. He walks down an Indian street, turns - showing off the beautiful lines of his profile - bumps into me, is dazzled by my scintillating personality and sweeps me into his arms. Fade to black.
What isn't supposed to happen is this:
Lots of people are making fun of the young woman who, with all the wisdom in her bouffant-laden head, asked Leung, "Do you like watching movies?"
Move over Chand Nawab from Karachi, this DD Anchor at IFFI, Goa is here to win the interwebs.http://t.co/OZedIF44yO#BestThingEver
- Raheel Khursheed (@Raheelk)November 27, 2014
Crazy DD anchor reporting from@IFFI2014Goa is the funniest thing you'll see today. I'm serious.http://t.co/hvl8xlV4ur [via@aaronpereira]
- Nigel Britto (@NigelBritto) November 27, 2014
While this woman is clearly not the brightest spark, my problem with her isn't her choice of question. Frankly, if Leung appeared in front of me, in a tux, and looked deep into my eyes, I'd probably end up saying something like "Gong xi fa cai" (that's "happy new year" in Mandarin) or "Voulez vous couchez avec moi?" (which is an ABBA song and while I wax eloquent about my hormonal intentions, it is perhaps not the best opening question during a red-carpet interview).
The reason why this lady has shocked and appalled me is that she isn't ogling at Leung. Leung is 52. Let me repeat this for maximum effect. He is 52. In 20 years, since he caught the world's attention in Chungking Express, his hotness has not slid a notch in 20 years. Just for that the man deserves to be ogled at, but Our Lady of Perplexing Questions was entirely unmoved by the fact that the actor was within clutching distance. Her gaze doesn't even follow him when he walks away.
This complete lack of excitement in theDoordarshan anchor along with the question she posed to Leung makes it evident that this woman has never heard of the man. Evidently, this woman did nothing by way of research before showing up to do the red carpet show at the International Film Festival of India in Goa.
By research I don't mean looking up which films Leung has acted in. I'm not saying she should have watchedChungking Express, Happy Together, In the Mood for Love, Infernal Affairs, 2046,Hero and Lust, Caution. She doesn't need to know that he's been part of international film juries and received countless awards for his acting. I'm just saying she should have noticed that in the swarm of moustachioed and pot bellied men in the IFFI guest list, there was just one face that gleamed with elegant sex appeal: Leung's.
Which brings me to the conclusion that Bollywood has destroyed the average Indian women's aesthetics. Remember those famous scenes from The Clockwork Orange, in which Alex's eyes are forced open and he's bombarded with violent images to make him averse to violence? Bollywood has done something similar to us. We've had unnaturally buff men thrown at us relentlessly so that we become immune to men who don't look like blow-up dolls. We've had to sit in theatres and see torsos that look like they've been inflated with a bicycle pump, magnified to fill the expanse of a cinema screen. There has been no respite and now, here's the fallout. A woman stands next to Tony Leung and is unmoved.
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