Column

A nostalgic look at how Sridevi set stalker's hearts aflutter, all those years ago

I suppose if you're above a certain age, you often have your moments when you shake your head, sigh wistfully and tell yourself, "The world isn't what it used to be". I experienced just such a passing-of-an-era moment when I read about the distressing life circumstance of Jack Jordan.

Now, you may not know Jack if you don't have a healthy interest in other people's lives, and don't patronise the high-brow journals that do their damnedest to elevate us by keeping us informed, down to the merciless minutiae, about the home lives of celebrities.
Jack is the man who was convicted last fortnight for stalking Hollywood actress Uma Thurman, the kick-ass star of Kill Bill. Evidently he used to hang around near her home and send her love letters, and in one of his more graphic outpourings, told her: "I imagine us in a cave a long time ago, Shiva-Parvati carved or mummified in that stone temple with the elephant outside of it.…"

Now, apart from instilling in me a sneaking admiration for Jack's stream-of-consciousness literary style and his evidently keen understanding of Hindu iconographic elements, the episode made me feel the weighty passage of time.

Here's why: Growing up in Chennai, in the early 1980s, I - and about half of humanity, as I seem to recall - used to do a fair bit of all that Jack did (and then some more), without ever being accused of stalking. We used to hang out near actresses' homes, and gawk unabashedly at them, tongues lolling, pulses racing, as they came and went. And if I could have had a Rupee for every epistolatory expression of love that my hormonally driven buddies sent to two-bit starlets, I wouldn't have to earn a living writing articles about the letters they wrote those two-bit startlets, if you know what I mean.

In fact, it says something of those libertarian times that anyone who didn't do as we did then would probably have seriously had everything from his sanity to his sexual orientation called into grave question.

One particular object of our adolescent adoration, I recall, was the actress Sridevi. This was during a time when she hadn't yet made it to Bollywood, but was coming into her own in Tamil and Telugu movies. Her house was close enough to our college, and quite early on, my fellow-undergrads and I concluded that lingering around her doorstep, in the hope of catching an occasional glimpse of her, offered far more important lessons in life than any that might have been imparted in a classroom.

In fact, it got to a point where we were more or less permanent fixtures in her neighbourhood, and even worked up a passing acquaintance with the gurkha who kept watch at her door. In exchange for the gift of a few cigarettes, he would give us scandalous - but probably entirely embellished and fanciful - 'insider' accounts of her daily routine; on occasion he would also spirit out autographed photographs of her, which we would hungrily add to our collection of Sridevi memorabilia.

Some of us even nursed hopes that just as in the movie Dear Brigitte, where Brigitte Bardot invites to France an eight-year-old boy who is besotted with her, we would gain private audience with Sridevi.

That never happened, of course, but here's the point: despite the seriousness of our collective and all-too-visible infatuation, all this was done in the sweet innocence of youth, in the freewheeling spirit of the Summer of 42. It really was another time and place, and it's one of those realisations that's enough to make me sigh wistfully and tell myself, "The world isn't what it used to be."
venky@dnaindia.net