3 lessons learnt by a "Titanic"ed buff..

Come Thursday and Indian fans will flock to the theaters surely to watch "Titanic" in 3D. I believe there is a whole generation in India who got their first lesson in love from this cult epic. From the forbidden excitement of making love to feel the agony of lost love- Titanic was the sole institution- the school- the bible, whatever one may name it for people like me who were in their adolescent when the movie got released in 1997. Ours was truly a "Titanic"ed gen.Followings are the 3things I learnt from Titanic -

1. A kiss to remember : When Jack -n-Rose locked their lips, it felt like time stood still forever. I saw the movie for the first time with my mother in the cinema hall and when the scene came both of us cleared our respective throats and fidgeted a little ( may be we are the last generation who still feels uneasy in seeing intimate scenes on screen before parents! ) in our seats but amidst all these uneasiness, the image of lip-locked Jack-n-Rose on the deck, the sun was setting behind them,leaving the sky crimson red- etched into my mind forever. And there i felt the significance and beauty of sharing the first kiss with the person who deserves it truly (even if after that, we share our 2nd,3rd and then subsequent kisses with less worthy candidates accidentally or incidentally!!!)

2. Nudity in Cinema : Before that, i never imagined that someone can go au naturel on-screen. Well, but till then i had only seen Sridevi and Ravina Tandon dancing in a wet saree, shaking off their booties provocatively or Simi Grewal changing her unmentionables in " Mera naam Joker" or Zeenat Aman left very little to imagination in " Satyam Shivam Sundaram" ( as i was and am still a hindi movie buff ,and i had no hint beforehand that Hollywood can go such far ! ) Though i must say Kate Winslet looked so ethereally beautiful in that scene and throughout the movie, that even my puritan mother who doesn't approve such "inappropriate scenes" on screen, still recalls her praise fully.

3. My heart will go on : This iconic song had such impact on my mind ( and on millions of girls like me all over the country! ) that i took the pain to cram the lyrics and sing it proudly before my awestruck classmates. Before Titanic i was in no habit of listening to English songs leaving alone remembering their lyrics but after watching the movie, i promptly bought a pair of cassettes named "100 of all time hits" which contains songs and respective lyrics of 100 hit filmy songs from Hollywood the songs and it had this bird call by Celine Dion in it. So in a way, Titanic taught me how to sing the first ever English song of my life.

There are numerous other facts, experiences, memories i can fondly associate with the movie but I rest my case here. I guess in the history of world cinema, there were very few movies came which had been welcomed by the spectators world wide irrespective of their nationality, culture, language, level of education, social strata and so on. I had seen our own housemaid gone to cinema to watch Titanic and then discussing about it happily to us, to narrate her experience of seeing first ever English "pikchar" of her life, though she couldn't write her name in hindi, forget about english. I have read in Khaled Hosseini's book " A Thousands of Splendid Suns" that even in war-ravaged afghanistan , people flocked to cinema halls to see titanic dubbed in pushtu (?) or whatever is their national language and liked it very much though theirs is an orthodox society.

Here lies the beauty of Titanic. Even after 15 years, when it is going to release for the 2nd time (in 3D), i believe people will appreciate it again. It is as timeless as love.Though a section of cine-pundits or "intellectual movie-buff" found many a faults in the movie but again some says falling in love is also a mistake in itself.