Ok. Here’s the setup. My girlfriend, Staceybug, comes over and lays down her idea for a relationship based blog that she dreamed up last night and wants to start acting on. I guess it’s the least I could expect given that she’s had to sit around an listen to me talk about Getting Things Done for the past 2 weeks straight. If it’s rubbing off on her then great for me, right?
Her idea is for the two of us to post both sides of the male/female perspective to the site. She thinks her creativity has been unleashed by the number of blog sites I introduced her in the few weeks since I forced her to get internet at her house. I think it was the fact that we spent most of last Saturday watching the three and a half hour Bollywood epic Lagaan.
This clip from the movie, which takes place in British controlled India during the late 1800’s, illustrates the love triangle between 3 of the main characters. The clip begins with Bhuvan, the primary hero, on the right, speaking to another character as Gauri, the girl in red, enters the scene from the left.
After the film cuts to night we see the villagers at temple, praying to statues of Krishna, avatar of their supreme being Vishnu, and Radha, Krishna’s main lover and the supreme female deitiy, also known as the goddess Shakti. Bhuvan goes on to tell Elizabeth, the English woman, how great was the love that Radha had for Krishna.
The basic story is that Radha had known Krishna thru her childhood and was his main consort and paramour. Although the love between them was great, Krishna wed to the princess Rukmini after rescuing her from an unwanted marriage. The story Bhuvan tells Elizabeth is that Radha was forced to marry another against her will. While this is true to some Hindu traditions, it is important to note that they disagree on the identity of Radha’s husband and even further believe that she never married at all or was secretly wed to Krishna. The common element among all of the stories is how Radha retained her endless and unconditional love for Krishna even as they were physically separated. As you watch the character interplay during the bell ringing scene, pay attention to Gauri’s jealous body language toward Elizabeth, who is already starting to fall in love with Bhuvan.
The dance that follows, named Radha Kaise Na Jale, (or How can Radha not be jealous?) tells the story of Radha and the other goat herding girls that Krishna would play with as a youth. In the dance, Bhuvan plays Krishna and Gauri plays Radha.
You may want to read the English translation on this site before or after you watch the video. I’ll leave it up to you. Either way watch the cocky confidence of Bhuvan thru the song and think about the line We speak of love in different tongues, different languages.
Part of what I think makes this such a great movie and story is it’s melodramatics. You know exactly who each character is as soon as they’re introduced, and Lagaan gave me the impression that I was watching a live action Disney movie, especially the entire cast spontaneously breaks into song.This scene stood out to me because of the way in which the mischievous Krishna/Bhuvan teases Radha/Gauri into becoming jealous even as he tries to reason with her:[...] even if Krishna meets a gopi,
in his mind, only the flowers of Radha’s love bloom.
Why should Radha be jealous?
Without thinking, without understanding,
why should Radha be jealous?
and later:
Gopis will come and go, Radha is this heart’s queen
and lastly:
Even if Krishna’s love is cultivated in a gopi’s heart
Why should Radha be jealous?
I think the whole thing that made this so interesting to me was the way the performances from Aamir Khan and Gracy Singh beautifully summed up the main cause of stress in me and Stacy’s relationship, mainly differences between my normal logical, admittedly narcissistic, what-did-I-do-wrong raison d’etre and her emotive, sometimes irrational or hormonal responses to some of the things I do.
As a last note about Lagaan, while the dance in question reveals Gauri belief of herself as Radha and Elizabeth as a love-lorn gopi, the perspective of the movie from Elizabeth’s point of view is that she see’s herself as Radha, and Gauri as Rukmini.
The point of all this was to serve up a starting point for my girlfriend to come back with a female perspective to some event in our lives. I hope that this posting helps set the stage for what’s about to come. I’m sure Stacy is going to have plenty to say about in her first post, which should be up this weekend if she’s still going out with me after reading this. Hopefully she’ll have plenty to say about Male Answer Syndrome (MAS), standards of cleanliness, and how important it is to make sure your guy has a man cave. have a cat) in the weeks to come.
