Watching 2.0 is like attending a buffet hosted by a dear friend. A buffet where you’re greeted by an army of well-dressed boys and girls sprinkling rose-water and those petals. As you walk down the lineup of dishes in order to check them out one by one, the initial curiosity turns into the dishes pile up in number and size, overwhelming with the overdose of flavours. And as you struggle to walk down as if trying to escape the feeling, you’re greeted by another army of catering boys and girls with fake smiles and robotic body movements.
You wonder why the clothes of the kids greeting outside were better ironed than the ones inside. The girls’ lipstick is smeared beyond their lip line. The boys’ leg openings of their pants are folded inside to adjust the size. They look sleepless as they move their hands in an attempt to guide to the food sections. You decide not to look at them anymore and just try to focus on the food cause now you’re hungry. You give up on checking out the lineup halfway and give in to the hunger and grab some unique-looking dish, preferably non-veg, fried, with a touch of a familiarity and something that can look cool enough to munch on. You are not too impressed and try the next starter. And the next. You feel guilty throwing the half-bitten starters with the images of kids in Somalia stirring in your head and then promise to pick the next amount of dish in eatable doses. But you wonder why the fucking starters don’t end and cry out for the main course. You shout at the top of your voice and hallucinate. Bang!
A swift cinematic transition happens and the same catering kids now robotically start walking towards you with starter dishes to feed you. They start stuffing your mouth with force as you resist. Your hunger only makes you more animalistic and you fight the kids punching in the face and demand to be fed the main course. The kids’ heads break and splatter like rotten tomatoes from the scenes of Brain Dead. The bloody broken heads mix into the dishes. As a response to your maincourse demand, they carry each dish one by one and dump them empty over you. Some kids make sure they pour the soupy dishes from over your head so that your entire hair drowns in it. Some in your eyes, nose, ears. Some from behind. Some from the side; some up, some down. Basically from all directions like a 3D film. Splashing food from all directions – only inedible stinky tasteless bloody mix. They keep pouring and pouring as you resist. You try to grab something to feed your hunger but you are only drowning in it – a pool of food – a thick sticky pool of the entire lineup. You nauseate. You start losing your breath. You almost die. But your survival instinct kicks in keeping you alive like Tom Hanks in Castaway miraculously escaping the catastrophe. Bang!
You wake up on an unnamed location realising what the fuck just happened. As the hallucination dies, you’re walking out of the cinema hall through the chattering crowd whether to be happy that you survived or curse yourself why you’d even go to attend it in the first place.
On your way back home, you wonder what the fuck is wrong with your friend and why he’s wasting so much money unnecessarily overfeeding the guests. Those kids in Somalia….. Then you’re like, “Hmm… sure this fellow wanted to host the most expensive buffet in history and he bloody did it. He always was an ambitious fellow.” But what the fuck he didn’t even say hello. And i’m like fuck it. Fuck him. I reach home and have some curd rice and decide drink lots of water for the next one week to detoxify.
Now I stopped having food wherever there’s buffet. It nauseates me. Now I prefer warm personal invitations with homemade food with heart. And Shankar remains a ‘Gentleman’ who is now a distant friend from my childhood.
amarnaths.com 