Let me start off with a confession. When Shackman suggested this title for our weekly LBC Friday posts, there was no question mark at the end of it. Being the coordinator I added it to add some spice to the topic. I hope that Shackman will forgive me.
For me it is not Movies Or The Theater, but Movies and the Theater. I am using the latter term here as one would use in the West though in India, even movie houses are called theaters!
My exposure to either started with the latter because in Montessori school, play acting is a very normal activity and I had acted in a few plays in school. That continued right till I finished high school, though from about the fourth grade in school, I had also started seeing movies primarily English ones, like Tarzan etc.
During the High School days, it was also quite normal for me to attend theater for Tamil plays which were very popular in Chennai where we lived then. During the same period, I also saw a great many Tamil movies but very few English ones, as they were screened by and large as Sunday morning shows due to lack of viewers.
After school life took very funny turn for me and I started seeing Hindi movies as we had moved to the North by then. From that time till about the mid nineties, I saw a great many Hindi and English movies but theater just dropped out of my orbit. By that time we were in Pune where I now live and it is a place where theater is a vibrant force, though I have not been to see a play in over seventeen years. One needs an appreciative companion to go and I simply haven’t found one since my late wife took ill and subsequently died.
I did not see any movies too during that time except for what came on in the TV. Since the last five years however, I have been catching up for the lost time by going regularly to movies in movie houses as well as via DVDs or Youtube. I am yet to start going to plays but I have every intention of when something nice comes along which should be a kind of a starting gun to get me into the mood. I will also have to find someone to go with and I think I know just who.
Shackman had suggested this topic for the weekly LBC blog posts. You can see what the other writers of the LBC have to say in their respective blogs. Maria, Pravin and Shackman.
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