Chopsticks in Manipur
Manisha Koirala looked resplendent in a white kurta and an angelic smile, her orange dupatta flying as she swung back and forth to the tune of 'Pyar hua chupke se'. The scene is from 1942: A Love Story, the last Hindi film I remember watching on the big screen in Manipur. That day my friends and I had skipped school, where I usually sat comfortably in the back row. In the theatre, sitting in the front row and watching Manisha tower over us, was painful on the neck. But who could have known that this was to be the last Bollywood-induced neck strain I was to feel in Manipur?
This was back in 1995, at a time when the cinema halls in Manipur showed mostly Bollywood and a few Hollywood films. A Manipuri film was also released around that time, Madhabee, and became a big hit. Yet the vast majority of the time it was posters of Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan, Madhuri Dixit, Raveena Tandon, with an occasional Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger, that occupied the hoardings and public walls. Over the following decade, however, the Bollywood posters slowly began to vanish, followed by the Hollywood posters. The last I heard about a Hindi film being shown in a Manipur theatre was Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, in 1999.