HOO-AAAH!

That expression tops my list of most-used-word-when-elated for the past few days. I picked it up from the character of Col. Frank from the movie The Scent Of a Woman. The part is played by whom else but Al Pacino.

It’s not the actor or the movie(though the acting is wonderfully flawless and the movie now tops the list of my favourites), but about  the character. The Colonel is a retired army officer, after serving the country for 26 years, and losing his vision. He sits in a room these days, in his niece’s house and drowns himself in about 40 pegs of his favourite “John Daniels”(Jack Daniels whiskey. As he claims, he is an old friend so he lovingly calls him John.).

The first impression of the man is someone very rude. He looks down upon people for being even slightly weak and judges them by their skin. Poor little Charlie, who had come forward to baby sit the blind man on a weekend job for easy money realises within the first 30 seconds of his interaction with the colonel, the money is not going to be really easy.

As we get to know the man better through Charlie’s eyes, we realise that he is really a man of feelings and one with a good heart down there. He puts up this mask of his harsh presence to cover up his shortcoming. To cover up the fact, that he messed it up real bad, when he was at service because he was standing up. Because, he had some principles.

Besides having a strong personality, he has, as he says, a strong liking for women. And a very far second one is Ferraris. He has a talent of telling what perfume the woman has used very accurately. He says he likes all kinds of women: Ones with long hairs, ones with short, and how he would do anything to bury his face in those long curls and sleep forever. He likes women with “big tits as well as small” and he doesn't mind even if the legs are like “Greek Columns” because there is “heaven In between them”. He almost objectifies women, until we get to know the real yearning down his heart: “you know Charlie, what gets me going? The hope that someday I will find a woman, who would wrap her arms around me, and wrap her legs around me, and still be there, smelling like fresh grass, the next morning.”

That changes my perspective of the man. All his life, he has been looking for company. For partnership of that one woman, who is perfect and who will be his. That says something about the man. He could get any woman he wants with that charming powerful personality of his. But if only…

That made me brood about things around me. I have seen people around me who are happily married for over 25 years now. Have they really found their perfect muse? The one with whom they can be perfectly happy? Or is it just another compromise to make themselves believe that they can’t do better? Or have they just given up the hope of getting their dream love and just surrendered to the reality?

A few days back, I was sitting beside the small lake at Lodhi gardens(I often do that because it gives me a certain peace of mind), and I watched two ducks swimming together till the middle of the lake. They seemed like some of the couples who were walking hand in hand on the soft grass ahead of me. And then suddenly, one of the ducks, turned back and started swimming back to join the others, leaving the other one in the middle of the lake. The duck left alone, seemed quite lost.

 It turned it’s head left and right wondering what just happened and then looked at the duck swimming away and gave out a cry, as if saying: “what happened? Why are you leaving me out here?” The other duck just looked back gave a shake of it’s head and continued swimming, as if saying, “you are not the one I was looking for. Move on  buddy.”

It is sad how trivial companionship means these days, or was it always like that? Do my generation really understand the meaning of promises and giving your word to someone? Or is it that my dad’s generation took it too seriously because they knew they had no other choice but to stick to the woman, he has married?

I came across this new term, “casual sex” when I was doing my post graduation from a journalism school. 

Everyone seemed to be or at least appeared to be quite “cool” with having a casual bout of hormones running through them, and they would jump on bed with some random person of the opposite sex, have some “fun” and the next morning they would be strangers. I often wondered is it that easy to just have sex (I would call it intercourse though) with someone without any emotions being involved? Or is it only me who is too back dated to not being a robot? I mean not that I haven’t had sex with people, whom I had no intentions of even dating, but there were emotions involved. I liked the men I took to bed, and we obviously were more than just strangers the next morning.

I always thought that I was not meant for this planet. I have been quite different from most of my peers, (gladly so) and have often been called unhinged or weird. But then as I think about it, alone, but not lonely, staring at the red-orange glow of the cigarette, I just smile and say, HOO-AAAH!! Yes I am different from most of you, and yes I am better.

P.S. this was written originally on 5.6.2013. On reading it now, it seems like I had started it with the intentions of writing a review of the movie, but I ended up just rambling about the thoughts boggling my mind.