Love in a Lunchbox

What really attracts us towards someone? If most of the Bollywood movies were to be believed, attraction would be an alien concept to people sans fair skin and film star looks. An industry where almost eight out of ten movies work on the ‘love at first sight’ concept, Lunchbox came as a whiff of fresh air by transcending the shallow world of appearances (or masks as I call it) and taking the concept of love into an altogether different realm – a realm of non judgemental and unadulterated conversations, or in other words, sharing in its purest form. Here were two people who were past their romantic best in terms of age and had never met before and yet the attraction worked on what it always works on - hope. And what is love but hope - a simple hope that out there someone wishes well for you in his/her silent prayers every night.

 When two people begin to fall in love, they only know the outline of the other person and the discovery of the core of the other person is an exploratory journey we call ‘falling in love’. That exploratory journey is supplied with innumerable bits and pieces of information about the other through various sources. Sometimes, they tell us explicitly about what their inner core looks like and sometimes we read into their words to develop an understanding of it. What I loved about Lunchbox, or what moves me about the story of Sajan and Ila every time I watch it is how the two characters find love in hope and hope in love and keep exploring the other through mere words. Just words. Does that even happen? Lunchbox tells me, yes, and in that process, gives me hope.

I was still in my college when Lunchbox came out and I remember how I fell for the movie straightaway. I was young and naïve and like so many of my age felt that I knew love. But that’s when the universe conspired to introduce me to this Ritesh Batra directed masterpiece that helped me understand why I was wrong and more importantly, why love has no definitions. Lunchbox asked some uncomfortable questions about love and romance in the least uncomfortable way. Do we fall in love only once? Can romance blossom at an age and stage of life where Sajan and Ila are? Can we fall in love with a stranger through his/her words? Are we to shut our feelings of love in a closet for once and all after the object of that love is no more in our lives? These are questions we don’t usually wish to confront. The love that Bollywood usually sells us and talks about is limiting. We are supposed to find true love in our lives once and devote the rest of our lives cherishing and nurturing it. But how does the heart that feels love once and dances to its music can’t feel the same emotion again?

I don’t know what end did Ila and Sajan’s story met but I know that what they went through was love. That’s what Lunchbox did to me as a movie. I know many around me who enjoyed it as a piece of beautifully crafted cinema, which it definitely was with its brilliant direction and flawless acting performances. But its impact on me went beyond that mere pleasure of a cinema lover. It made me ask tough questions to myself about my understanding of love and significantly altered its understanding. Lunchbox told me that love, if it’s that fabled grand feeling that our ancient texts and romantic classics are teeming with, can’t be a limiting concept.

Or maybe, love isn’t a grand feeling at all. It lies there in those small concerns and well wishes that we more often than not dismiss as irrelevant. Maybe, that’s why it was rather apt that we never came to know about the ending of the movie, for it would have established love as ‘THE’ grand feeling around which our lives revolve, and in the movie, Sajan and Ila’s lives revolved. Love lies in those little compliments from a stranger that bring a smile to a woman’s face who has little in life to cheer her up. Love lies in that worry of Sajan which makes him stop his auto and enquire about the suicide which he begins to fear is committed by the random stranger he is talking through chits. Love lies in Ila’s concern for Sajan’s health when he tells her of his smoking and love lies in Sajan finally quitting it for that faceless person on the other side of the letters. And love definitely lies in the hope that one day they will finally meet in Bhutan. That’s what Lunchbox left me with. Maybe, love is small and yet grand. It doesn’t need to have the most awe-inspiring of endings if it is there, just there in your story.

The reason I feel love stories touch us, some more deeply than others, is simply because of the abundance of such stories in our lives. No, it’s not the stories of people around us that we connect the ones we watch on the silver screen most with. If anyone tells you that, it’s most probably a well-disguised lie. All those stories that we end up giving our hearts to are, in fact, somewhere secretly connected to us and our stories. We all have a bit of Raj in us. We all have a bit of Rahul in us. And some of us probably grow into a Sajan at some stage of our lives. Seeing the stories of Raj, Rahul and Sajan prosper on the screen tickles our hearts and provide an escape to those innumerable colorful characters within us that hitherto lay trapped in our mundane unromantic existence.

So, can romantic love stories change lives or change our worlds, maybe? Well, that seems like too farfetched a dream. The blame falls squarely on the shoulders of the filmmakers who, to make their cinema presentable, put so much gloss on the stories that beyond a point they lose any touch with reality and end up being, well, just a story to entertain oneself with. Lunchbox was able to tug at my heartstrings because it told me a story where the hero was hardly a hero by Bollywood standards and the heroine hardly a heroine. They were ordinary beings like us caught in their even more ordinary existence. But Bollywood has unfailingly failed to capture this simplicity and in that process sequestered away opportunities to touch our hearts with relatable love stories. Worse, some have even stopped pretending to tell a story and are happy serving what they think of is ‘entertainment’. Consequently, in recent times, romantic movies have got a bad name they are struggling to shrug off. It’s a pity that movies like Lunchbox are sadly far and few between to inject in this society a much-needed dose of love and romance.