Abhiyum Naanum

Its Saturday, and I've cried bucketfuls all morning. My little one who was sitting next to me, looked at me in alarm and patted my hand thinking it was a booboo. I look at him and tell him I'm okay...I didn't get hurt...its only that my heart is full.

I've watched Abhiyum Naanum for the first time, and while I expected some histrionics, melodrama and an overkill on the father-daughter concept, I was in for a very pleasant surprise. What a lovely touching tribute to the relationship between a father and daughter. For that matter, what a poignant look at the birth and evolution of a parent and child. I am intensely touched. Whether it was the super cool way in which the father treated his daughter's first love letter, given how ultra protective he could be at all other times, or the cool sense of practical reason which peppered the mother's love, or the slightly irritated confidence with which the daughter says for the first time at 15, that she knows what she is doing....there was something in all of that for me to relate to.

But perhaps the most touching aspect of the story was the day, when as a girl of 10, she brought a beggar home because he lay faint from hunger, outside her school, and her heart went out to him. From that day forth, he was adopted by the family and became one among them. This is the story which reaches out to me the most....because it is a story of the human spirit, and pure love. On an anniversary, when the family was to go out to dinner to a fancy hotel, this new adopted member was also asked to go alongwith them, and when the girl spoons out a dish onto his plate asking him to eat it...his eyes become full, his emotions choke, and he looks at the father and says...this is my mother. There must have been a lights, camera, action to prompt that take, but the words and the feeling far surpass the medium of cinema, and touches you deep down. I am grateful that such a concept was born and seized creative interest, that people came together to give their energies to it, that it made it to viewing distance.

" Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life. ~G.K. Chesterton"

The movie ends with a picture of a baby on a father's shoulder, with a line that says...Child is the father of man. Is that any new thought around here? :) Cliched as it has become, it is still true and there is living proof of it almost everyday. Children are living, breathing, walking 101's and we really start off being the dummies that need all the lessons. In the process of imparting values to them, we have to live with our hypocrisy many a times, knowing that we are still hopelessly flawed, yet...how can we stop preaching, what we must follow ourselves? Life has to go on, parents have to do what parents will have to do and love flows...mostly downwards.

There are a lot of disjointed thoughts which refuse to cooperate in coming together in a more orderly fashion. The aftermath of this lovely movie speaks and I feel like November 14th has come a whole 8 months early. Today, R has gone in to work and its a full day for him, and he will be back only in the evening. That leaves me and my boys....me and my two children. And I think its time once again....to grab the moment...and make it count!