Love in a wired world.....

Last week, idly surfing the TV channels, I chanced upon a Tamil movie. The movie must have been made a decade ago and was a tender love story which involved many twists and turns in the plot. Central to the progress of the plot was the idea of communication (or lack of it).

The heroine does not have a telephone at home and has to go to the neighbour’s house or to a phone booth to call the hero. This often leads to strange situations where she is not able to inform him of some important happening in her life, or pass on vital information like the fact that she has to leave town immediately. While he waits to meet her at the designated spot, she passes by within yards of him on a crowded railway platform, and the two do not see each other. We almost feel like crying out, ‘Turn and look. She is leaving on that train.”

I am sure many of us would recall similar situations in numerous Indian movies, in all languages, where misunderstandings created poignant situations and carried the plot forward.

With the advent of the ubiquitous mobile phone, our movies have lost much of their old-world charm. When you are constantly connected through voice or text, how can there be a lack of communication? There is a surfeit of it, and our scriptwriters can no longer bank on the old tool of miscommunication. In the process, however, our stories have lost some of that poignancy that characterized movies made even a decade ago.

In fact, it has reached the other extreme. A recent ad for a mobile service provider features a young couple texting each other. Only at the end do we realize that they are not far apart, but on the same park bench and that, in fact, the man is lying on the girl’s lap. Why text, when you can look into the eyes of your beloved and say what you want to say? Where is the romance here?

Being constantly connected, constantly in each other’s lives, can be overwhelming. But one cannot deny that today’s lovers will not suffer for want of receiving that all-important message, or vital piece of information that may make or mar their relationship.