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Are obsessive lovers from reel life encouraging stalking in the real world?Akele, akele, kahan ja rahe ho, hame sath lelo jahan ja rahe ho ( Where are you off alone, why not take me along? ) She is furious at being followed but the fury soon turns to an exasperated pout and by the time the song ends, she is a puddle of adoration. We all knew as we watched Shammi Kapoor and Sharmila Tagore in Evening in Paris in a darkened hall or on our TVs in wooden cabinets that she would fall for him finally . Look back at the number of classic serenades where the hero waylaid the woman, tugged at her dupatta or pallu or jumped out from behind a tree. And the stalking would end, always, in a shaadi.
"Hindi films continuously used the trope of male persuading female and her going from being really annoyed to giving in. We also had a number of songs of women pursuing men and manaoing them," says Paromita Vohra, creative director of Agents of Ishq, a multimedia venture that talks of love and sex with honesty and humour.
But over the decades, the chase became far less lyrical, far more offensive and much more sexist -the pawing became aggressive and you had to be naive to laugh it off as chhed chhad. But it wasn't until recently when real life stories of violent stalking, acid attacks and deadly retribution for rejection surfaced that everyone began sitting up to make the connection. There were way too many similarities between real and reel stalking. Ranjhanaa, Happy Ending and, more recently , Sultan -all emphasise the stalking stereotype -that women remain unaware of their love for men till they are prodded (sometimes literally).
(Image: BCCL)
Not just Bollywood, stalking is a regular fixture in Tamil romantic films starring popular stars like Dhanush, Sivakarthikeyan, Simbu and Arya. A small town wastrel falls for a bright, spirited girl and usually ha rangues her into submission. "It is like he does not need a job, any professional ambition or financial goals in life. It is enough for him to obsess over a woman 24x7," says V Iswarya, a Chennai academic who initiated the #campaignagainststalking and a change.org petition asking the Tamil film industry to say no to stalking scenes and stories. The popular southern actor Sidharth tweeted in support.
Siddharth "@Actor_SiddharthWe've been selling a terrible dream in our films for long. That any man can get the woman he wants just by wanting her enough. Must change!
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Siddharth "@Actor_SiddharthWhen a woman stalks a man in our films she's a vamp. When a man does it he is a hero. It's a complicated discussion. But it needs to be had.
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Last month, in TN's Villupuram, a young Class XI girl, Naveena burnt to death as her stalker, a 32-year-old driver set himself on fire and hugged her. These dramatic gestures of punishing a girl as you yourself perish have been the mainstay of Tamil films for some time now. The recent murder of a young techie Swathi in Chennai by a young man still struggling to find his feet in life is prime example of this trope that films push.
The song, Senjitaley, from an upcoming Sivakarthikeyan starrer, Remo is the latest to join the conversation on filmi stalking. "I don't want it easy , I want to torment you into submission," sings the male figure. Filmdom's standard defence is that it imitates society and not the reverse. This is now being questioned. "If interaction between the sexes is considered taboo, and if their only exposure to 'love' is through Tamil movies, it's not too difficult to see why young people grow up thinking that stalking will eventually change the girl's no to a yes," says Aparna Namboodiripad, a volunteer with the campaign against stalking.
Arjun
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