Celine # rolestroll_5

"A memory's never finished, if you really think about it"
     ~ Celine
Movie - Before trilogy
                       

She is a girl with a different and interesting outlook on everything around her. She is ravishingly beautiful and her presence feels like a soft breeze. Her words are soft and simple yet deep and inpactful. She gets out of a train with a stranger beacuse she invested her trust in him just after hearing about story of his grandmother and unusual dreams.She is incurably romantic and her process of falling in love is very close to whatever I ever imagined for myself. Like standing in a listening booth with Kath Blooms 'come here' playing in background and you feeling the his look on your face while you are looking away.I could totally relate about how she is obsessed by little things like when she tells Jesse how she remember the way his beard has a bit of red in it. And how the sun was making it glow,  that morning,  right before he left. She believes that one can never replace anyone because everyone is made up of such beautiful specific details.But she is also a girl who is never reciprocated the love and efforts she put in a relationship and every one of her exes just thank her for making him a better person while she is left perturbed with the fact that why didn't they choose her in the first place and starts to loose her belief in love. She feels that the idea that you could only be complete with a person is absurd and evil. She is brutally honest and totally aware and unapologetic about what she wants from life. She knows how to love without expecting anything in return throughout wax and wane. She will sing you a waltz and will make you miss that plane. 

Veera Tripathi #rolestroll_4

"जहाँ से तुम मुझे लाये हो वहाँ वापस नहीं जाना चाहती
जहाँ ले जा रहे हो वहाँ पहुंचना नहीं चाहती
पर ये रास्ता... ये रास्ता बहुत अच्छा हैं
मैं चाहती हूँ ये रास्ता कभी ख़त्म न हो "
        ~वीरा त्रिपाठी
Movie - Highway
                               

William Shakespeare said that "People usually are happiest at home" but what if your home is the place where you are inflicted harm beyond repair and everything around you reminds of horrors that snatched away your entire childhood. The bedsheets remind you that how hard you got hold of it and struggled for help when your uncle had first made a bad move on you, every corner reminds you of disgusting memories,washroom where you rubbed yourself for hours but couldn't get rid of that touch and the terrace where you walked at night wanting to get rid of the pain between your thighs that has by now become perpetual. Veera who would seem to you as the most cheerful girl, idiotic and weird sometimes but you will never hear the chaos,  screams and turbulence within her.She loved the company of her abductor and found it to be more safe than her home. She overcame her burden of silence and grief. It was a cathartic journey of self discovery and an inspiration to every person who was sexually abused as a child in any way or the other. Those who have to keep seeing that relative again and again,  smiling at them and bending to touch their feet, listening to their lies that you are the best girl because  why wouldn't they say that. Us, who have to live in a society where screams of children are hushed to maintain the prestige of family and incest is casual mistake and not a crime.Veera found freedom in bondage,  got over her fears, learnt to get rid of her pain by lessening the pain of others who are equally hurt.Its a character I can't forget even if I wanted to for the rest of my life.

Devi Pathak #rolestroll_3

"संगम दो बार आना चाहिए, एक बार अकेले एक बार किसी के साथ"
            ~देवी पाठक
Movie - Masaan
                         

 Its painful to lose someone you loved but it's worse when you can't even shed tears for them. Even though you are emotionally jarred you have to fight the unseen battles waiting ahead that you don't even deserve. Devi is a women who corrected her decision for premarital sex as curiosity rather than a crime and stood unapologetic about her sensuality. Living in a society where people leak mms of innocent girl or woman and many other buy into her shame; but it will always be she who is the one to be blamed. She faces the taunts of society,  dismissal from workplace and  constant harassment from the police; but none of this deters her from moving ahead with her life without any feeling of guilt or shame.She continues to live with the memory of her lost lover and tries to get rid of the guilt of his death in the solace of the Sangam. Her character is unforgettable and so is this movie which unravels the concept of death beautifully in following line

"ज़िन्दगी क्या है अनासिर में ज़ुहूर-ए-तरतीब, मौत क्या है इन्हीं अज़्ज़ा का परेशान होना"

Miloni Shah #rolestroll_2

"फिर जब मैंने वो अपनी फोटो देखी तो मुझे लगा कोई और ही हैं, वो मुझसे ज्यादा खुश लग रही थी " 
~ मिलोनी शाह
Movie - Photograph
                   

When I was little I didn't dream of becoming astronaut, engineer, pilot, actor and definitely not a doctor as other children would. I would look at the masons, building the first floor of my house entire day while my mother would call me downstairs to complete my homework saying if I don't study I would end up being like them. But all the while I would wonder how good their job is. I would keenly watch them setting the layers of bricks or making the cement paste. I remember everything by heart ; here, build a volcano of cement and some sand and make a hole in between, then pour some water and mix it with an axe, one quadrant at a time. I would imitate the same during dinner making a volcano out of rice, spilling daal over it and mixing it with my spoon. Sometimes I wanted to live on remote mountains with sheeps and waking up each day to feed them, cut woods, collect food from forest and cook for the rest of my life. Sometimes I wanted to be the ferryman and sometimes the person who plays iktara in front of monuments until the day I learnt that these aspirations are disparaged and downlooked in society and would be construed as lack of abilities and ambition so I gave up upon them. Also I made sure to start this piece with ' When I was little'although I still sometimes want to go back to those dreams because I don't want to be called crazy.
    When I watched the movie Photograph I was relieved to see that someone else thinks that way too. Miloni, an intelligent young girl, all set to become an CA just tooks a pause and reflects upon on what she wants after she meets a photographer who took some pictures of her. She fascinates of leaving everything behind and living in a village she has never been to, working entire day and then falling asleep under a tree and open sky.Befuddled between what life has to offer and what she wants from life,  between the people she wants to meet the people with whom she has to stay,  its about a girl with stupid yet stirring story.

Erin Brockovich #rolestroll_1

"Well,  I think I look nice. And as long as I have one ass instead of two I'll wear what I like if that's all right with you? You might want to re-think those ties."
~ Erin Brockovich
                               

The first thing I did after this movie was if this movie was to google about the P&G lawsuit and to find out it was indeed an actual, ordinary lawsuit in 1990s ; but the thing that makes it extraordinary is a feisty, weird, hot headed middle aged women. When she won a beauty peagent at an young age she believed she could conquer the world but is now unemployed, broke, divorced mother of three. When she finally do manage to get her job back ( which she lost due to maternity leave) in law firm she makes sure she gives it her best shot. She is a women who speaks her mind and blurts back if someone questions her choice of clothes. The fact that she is undereducated and is a normal clerk doesn't undermines her hope of doing something big.She delves herself into paperwork to find out about an hitherto unnoticed connection between increased health problems surrounding a company. She undertakes an independent investigation, collects evidence, gives it all her sweat and time to deduce that this giant company is unlawfully using a harmful radioisotope causing malignancy and serious diseases among people in neighboring residence. She talks to people day in and day out,  adding more plaintiffs, listening to people empathetically and deciding to fight for them not as lawyer but as one among them. She is emotional yet manipulative, unsure yet unstoppable, nervous yet undaunted. When lawyers pointed out gliches in her case telling  her she doesn't have the phone nos. of all 400 plaintiffs she asks them whose no. do they need as she knows the name,  address,phone no.,  history, diseases, family details of all those people by heart. She worked relentlessly unless the people got justice. The case was settled in 1996 for US$333 million, the largest settlement ever paid in a direct-action lawsuit in U.S. history. All of this was possible because of a crazy adamant women,who was far from being perfect; but just didn't give up on her dream and proved it that to accomplish the perfect perfecrion, little imperfection helps.