Chapter 14: Somethings are apparently worse than death; like equating "melancholy" to "sadness".
Tears were flowing from their eyes. Riddhima's breath was coming short and it looked as if Armaan was about to have an asthma attack very soon. Rahul who was sitting next to them was sulking and looked ready to cry.
The D-Day of the premiere of the crappiest drama ever to be played had arrived. Armaan and Riddhima had bonded over crappy play, bullshit dialogues and horrible acting. Riddhima had become Nikki's girl Friday. Nikki had gotten into her head that every actress had to have an entourage to carry around stuff. Of course it escaped her nimble brain that she was an actress only the premises of their college campus.
Abhi and Nikki had bullied many people into buying tickets and few voluntarily bought them. Of course the voluntary ones were - Armaan, Riddhima and Rahul. Armaan had bought huge back of pop corn and Riddhima was in charge of drinks. The sat in the very first rows, the best seat in the house along with Rahul. Also the fact that they were the authors and script writer of the most awesome drama, the pipsqueaks of their college were looking at them in reverence.
Muskaan had stuck to the script quite obediently. However she had made one small tiny change which has pissed off Rahul.
Actually it wasn't Muskaan's fault that Nikki and Abhi shared one single brain cell. Or for the fact that many of the fan girls of that story had brain cells, the number of which can be counted in two hands. So his script had posed problematic when the artistes (*cough cough*) couldn't pronounce half of them. Anjali the poor sister who always played Second fiddle (welcome Simmie') to her older sister, who also happened to be the second lead in the drama, had expressed her fear of messing up words.
Also Abhi at one point had exclaimed ' "Muskaan, you didn't tell me that we have to speak foreign language", rather restlessly. Muskaan looked ready to cry and preached Rahul how love necessitates itself (I am most awesome for doing this!) after the script landed in her hands. Rahul had come running to Armaan and Riddhima and had ranted like a hen for thirty minutes.
"I feel for you Rahul, I really do", Riddhima said, swallowing fresh set of giggles. Rahul glared at her.
"Are you going to tell Muskaan that this cannot be done?" Armaan asked.
"And fall into an inferno of love (the awesome-est masterpiece) by going against Muskaan? You are crazy Armaan. I might as well shoot myself after taking cyanide and stabbing myself twice." Rahul replied glumly. Riddhima couldn't control further and let out fresh bout of laughter. Rahul sulked, Armaan grinned.
"Okay, okay, we will help you 'fix' your script, wont we Armaan?" Riddhima said looking at Armaan. They both shared a grin. And that grin said it all. They were going to have some fun.
"What did she want to be fixed, again?" Riddhima asked pulling out pencils and handing over one of them to Armaan.
"Her words - 'Dumb the damn thing down'", Rahul replied flatly. Armaan and Riddhima sniggered but didn't bother answering Rahul. They shared a common principle - Never kick an already fallen down puppy. (Exception cases are present, but they are quite complex and the author believes that the nincompoops who are reading this story cannot handle the truth.)
Once they got down to "dumb it down" mode, Armaan and Riddhima honestly sympathized with Rahul. He had written decent script for a crappy story and had given a matured outline to it by standardizing dialogues and adding intelligent voice over in all right places. Of course he had made the story complex and characters a neat shade of gray. But he-robot and she-robot had trouble understanding words and in some cases even in pronouncing and Muskaan secretly agreed with them.
Not that she would tell Rahul on his face that he was a vocabulary junkie.
And so fixing of the script began.
(The ones in Brown are Rahul's dialogues. The ones in pink are the replacement dialogues.)
(Confession: The first four Rahul's dialogues from my own OS. I am too lazy to think of new stuff. Yeah, am mocking my own writing)
Scenario: The hero and the heroine meet. Hero fantasizes about girl.
"The smell was a mixture of freshly plucked green apples, smell of earth after getting soaked by first rain and rich honeysuckle. Every time this smell was in the vicinity of my nose, I knew you were nearby. It was an exotic mixture of spring, monsoon and autumn; both your perfume and your personality."
"You smell nice."
Scenario: Heroine misses the hero (the typical scenes which you see after first three months of a daily soap. Hero and heroine have at least one zillion misunderstanding and suddenly heroine starts missing hero after a lame track.)
"When thoughts lay heavy on mind, then time, almost always, seems at its slowest. Everything in this world seems trivial when you focus on that one thought, that one need. No one could possibly know how you feel. At that moment, you are truly alone in this world and where no understanding exists. All the other problems that exist in this one life are thrown aside for this one desire."
"I miss you."
Scenario: The guy finally gives into the true love speech made by a random-er and asks the girl to be his girlfriend.
"Sometimes being ourselves is not enough, yet we somehow manage to get through this life. But sometimes, you honestly wish that there was someone else to share the things that you are going through however bad it might be; just so that you could be understood better. I stopped looking for that kind of person when I met you. What people don't realize is that nothing is forever or permanent. People fall in love, sometimes get married and have kids. In the process they get swept away by life and become oblivious to everything around them. It's not like a person stops caring about the other overnight; it's a gradual devolution. Everything has a lifespan and a shelf life; even love, even commitment. Given the state of things, our jobs, our attitudes towards life, you would want to know these answers. Will we fall out of love? Not if we are equal partners in the relationship. Will we be together for the rest of our lives? We might if we continue to learn things from each other and nurture our relationship every passing day. Will we be happy? I am certain that will be. Today, all I can do is to fall in step with you and be next to you and deal with whatever life would throw at us. Together"
"Be my girlfriend."
Scenario: Guy hurts girl. Or vice-versa. Or whatever. Who cares. (Imagine any track any daily soap of any language. I am sure you will find gazillion instances. So spare me from introducing redundancy here.)
"Suddenly I have no words, no ideas left. There is a deep sorrow that I feel when I pick up a pen to write. My hands smoothen absent crease on paper while my brain fumbles with words. Then I feel that there is inertia when it comes to penning down the words that swirl inside my head similar to the way the multi-hued water in a container in which the painter dips various colored painting brushes. The way one cannot make out a single color in that container, I am not able to pick out one idea, one word, one coherent thought that would make a sentence. A single tear escaping the confines of my eyes is the only resultant of the invisible pulling of strings of my heart; besides heart ache that is. Another tear escapes as my hands write those letters that make up your name. Even with the lack of clarity, my mind gush a million and one thing, my heart tries to override my mind, admonishes it and dictates a beautiful sonnet. The delirium that surrounds me suffocates me and hurts me. Amidst all the chaos that's taking place in my mind and heart and their internal warfare, my fingers writes those three little words that my pride hadn't allowed me for a while."
"I am sorry."
Scenario: Someone asks a question to which no one has answer to. (The traditional silly and stupid questions which series makers think are rhetoric but all cynical fans throw a million replies to.)
"The words you utter have no intrinsic meaning to whatsoever concerns regarding the memories at hand. We have come this far by crossing around many hurdles, by beating around thousands of bushes and sidestepping over real matters. There have been innumerable eye locks, blatant wanton stares from both parties and after all that here we are. We are at this juncture where one has to decide between what has to be done and what the heart truly desires. It doesn't matter what one truly wishes to since the norms of the society is such that it will bring in its creepy paws to nudge us or claw us to take the decision which is in the end expected out of us. So by evaluating all this and various other unwritten parameters, I wish I could give you a concrete response to your question but given the condition I am in, I am fully unable to do so."
"I don't know."
Scenario: Saying "yes" when hero proposes (I think. You can imagine this scenario is other places as well.)
"There are many ways to acknowledge superficial expressions of the face. However when that is coupled with the subtle shifts in the way body parts move or react, it gets much clearer in perspective about what one truly wishes to say. Keeping all these ideologies in mind I succumb to the positive energy flowing in my body which makes me completely elated with the prospect of acknowledging facts that you just presented upon."
"Yes."
Scenario: Hero/heroine gives lame reason to stay away from one another. (Yet another classic I-want-to-sacrifice-everything-for-you-and-your-well-being syndrome which covers the wall of red blood cells of our protagonists.) So their counter part disagrees to their line of argument.
"Is it necessary for you to utter those words? It makes you look like an arriviste and it pains me to even acknowledge whatever you just mentioned. Your Teflon coated words only manages to shred apart the integrity of the argument where the speaker in person had had the upper hand up until now. But unfortunately your words only made him detract the words he had already spoken and now everything has to be retracted to ground zero."
"Whatever you just said is bullshit."
--
"Wow, Rahul does love words, doesn't he?" Riddhima remarked after stretching her back.
"They are not so bad, only a mouthful." Armaan grinned.
They were fixing Rahul's script and there were few places where the two of them actually enjoyed his writing which desperately tried to mask their crappy story. However with new script, it reduced the complexity of the characters and made them pure white or plain black.
Muskaan entered library to check on Armaan and Riddhima and found them not fighting.
"Must be a Mirage (how can I ever forget you, miss stones?)", she thought and rubbed her eyes vigorously. No, they were actually getting along.
But the matching evil grins they sported made her stomach drop. It was never a good idea to put them together in the same room with a dictionary, thesaurus and a script.
Muskaan only hoped that she didn't look like an idiot once drama was done.
But knowing the two, she had a bad feeling about it.
Next week: What did Armaan and Riddhima actually fix? And what happened during the premiere of the play?
Sookie Scriptwriter
Edited by -Sookie- - 14 years ago
Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi 2
18