Someone once told me: “After all, it is just light from the back of a projector which falls on a blank white wall. And yet, people will dance in front of it, throw flowers at it, hoot and whistle, laugh and cry, clap & dance, scream & cringe. its all a little overdone.”

As you would expect, the whole group just looked at him, then proceeded to ignore anything else he said for the rest of the afternoon. And for weeks, we would try not bumping into him when we went for our addas. He got the hint pretty quick I can tell you. And became a Rajnikant fan. Well some-what.

I never admitted it back then, but I don’t get the flower-throwing either. Imagine carrying flowers in for a repeat watch, determined to throw flowers at your idol. Its not spontaneous enough, somehow. But the multiplexes these days are such a different world. You hear babies crying sometimes, and the occasional phone conversation. But that perfect world of balcony hush & stall mayhem is getting increasingly rare.

So now if I cry, or clap after a movie, some people shoot dis-approving and stunned glances at me. But they’ll all fucking stand up for the national anthem and sing along with me with gusto.

But who cares. Whether its a Rs. 15 box seat at Payal, or a Rs. 280 L-row seat at PVR, cinema is and always will be cinema. And whether you like summing up your cinema with throughly inadequate adjectives, or, like me, prefer displaying all the sorts of emotions the film-makers laboured to evoke during the film and writing about it later; whatever your flavour, just go see more cinema. For God know if you will be alive or not tomorrow.