My Dad, who died in May 2001, loved the movies. I inherited that trait from him. Dad's affair with the pictures began when he was in college. He and his friend would buy an anna worth of peanuts and walk the three km to the nearest cinema hall munching the nuts slowly so they would last for the way. Week after week on this brief trek to Trivandrum's Sreekumar theatre, they did the same. Most English movies that were released in TVM then were trash. A few though were liquid gold like say, Lawrence of Arabia.But the picture that my dad most liked was You Only Live Twice. He knew that the movie was just an entertainer. But the circumstances in which he saw the movie were such that it occupied a special place in his heart.
After completing his MA in Sociology, Dad hunted for a job for about eight months. He became increasingly depressed that it was taking him so long to become independent financially. After failing to land a particularly sought after job as a psychiatric social worker, my Dad came to his hotel room and worried about his uncertain future. Deciding to shake off the blues, he went for a walk that ended in a movie hall, which was screening YOLT. When he left the movie in which Bond famously lives twice, my Dad believed he had a second chance. A month later he landed a job in a bank.
I began watching pictures with my Dad as a kid. In our neighbourhood in Nagercoil, English movies were taboo because of their sexual content. Even the now acceptable levels of sex in James Bond movies were then frowned upon. But my Dad, being an enthusiastic Bond fan, took me watch some of these pictures. My mom, who was too ill to accompany us to the theatre, would make him promise that I would be sent out of the hall during the kissing scenes. I distinctly remember watching Never Say Never Again, Sean Connery's last brush with the Bond franchise, in this comic fashion.
In his middle age, Dad's interest in films waned and he began enjoying the more mindless movies, like Narashimham. That was the last movie I saw with him.
