...Ah, Prince. Little did he know when he first performed When Doves Cry for Purple Rain that one day the Indian fillum industry would be using doves to make PEOPLE cry.

Here are three instances of doves in Hindi movies.

Maine Pyar Kiya: God damn! A whole fucking song was built into this scene just so they could send a message from Bhagyashree to Salman. This scene could have been soooo much better. Here's my version of the scene:

"Mmm... wonder if the kabootar is single?" Ten years after this movie's success, Salman went on to make a few bucks. Oh wait, I meant to say he SHOT a buck.

Bhagyashree starts to miss Salman, who is away at some party missing her as well, and decides to send him a love-note via Pigeon Post. She starts to sing Kabootar, Ja Ja and ties the note around the dove's neck. She finishes the song, and smiling, with tears in her eyes and anticipation in her heart, lets it fly. A passing hawk effortlessly grabs said dove in its talons and rips it apart in mid-air. Dove craps itself just before it dies, and said crap lands on Bhagyashree's cheek, and she exclaims, "D-Oh! Teri jaat ka baida!" and goes on to pick the next dove, while wiping her cheek on the arbit silver sheet of cloth that Salman has been secretly saving for the last verse of Mere Rang Mein...

The next two dove-references are from Kannada movies, BOTH starring Shivraj Kumar.

AK47: Shivraj Kumar's character falls in love with his Punjabi neighbour's widowed daughter, a Punju hottie in real life who had God knows what kind of majboori to star opposite this ugliest of uglies. She has a real complex about being a widow, and is also quite soft-spoken. Shivraj's character has to play his cards straight on this one, and he plays them carefully. The courtship ritual is long-winded and painful to watch (especially since you are supposed to imagine her with him), but ends up with them on some part of the Bombay seaside. Shivraj is ready to propose marriage, but he wants to do it in a novel way. All the diamond-commercial douchebags in the US could actually learn from this ugly mofo! He gives her a long speech about life and shit (not unlike the long speech that Rajesh Khanna ends with "Aakhir kyon?" in the movie of the same name, before he applies sindoor to Smita Patil's maang) and then says something about how she has to be free, choose freedom, choose life [Wake Me Up!], relive her youth, and when he's done with all that bullshit, he pulls out his trump card. No, not his trouser snake, you morons, not yet.

He reveals what he has been hiding in his hands - a dove, that for some reason, is wearing a sticker tikli (the kind you can buy in a local train in Bombay - ten for a buck, the fancy ones) on its forehead! I think he means for her to transfer said tikli to her forehead, and then set the dove free, get it? Wow! Marriage and freedom at the same instant! Trust these Digas to mix their metaphors!

Finally...

Preethse: (I think it means, literally, Preet Say, say you love me, or at least love me) An awesome copy of Darr featuring the most awesome Upendra in that asshole Shah Rukh's role, the ugliest of uglies himself, Shivraj Kumar, in Sunny Deol's role, and guess who they found to star in Juhi Chawla's role - in contrast to this butt-ugly hat-trick hero: the awesomely hot Sonali Bendre. I would once again question the heroine's discretion in choosing people to act opposite, but then I remember Sukhbir Jandu's New Stylee album cover, at least the copy that we got free with Stardust or something like that. If you guys have seen that cover, and used to like Sonali Bendre (like my cousin), you probably still hate Sukhbir Jandu. Ten years later, my cousin's face STILL screws up in disgust when I mention Sukhbir's name, haha!

L to R: The Cool, The Cute and The FUgly.

Anyway, remember the scene at the end when they are all on the boat, and Shah Piece-of-shit-hammer Rukh is dying and is delivering his last lines? In Preethse, Upendra's character repents when he sees how much Sonali loves King Ugly, shoots himself, and in his monologue, he says something about how he has realized that they love each other a lot, and love is the best thing that can ever happen to anyone, and how he wishes them all the best in their life, and BITCHISTILLCANTBELIEVEYOULOVETHATUGLYPIECEOFSHIIIII.... he dies. This scene was actually not too bad, not too overdone, especially since Shah Rukh wasn't in it. We weren't really laughing during this scene (we definitely HAD been during most of the rest of the movie!), which meant that we actually thought this part was quite okay. That all changed in a femtosecond. As soon as Upendra breathes his last breath, the moviemakers decided to show the audience that his last great sacrifice won him a place in heaven and all his sins were forgiven. They achieved this not only by having the usual female chorus do their "Aaaaaaa..." bit at the end, but mixed in a few more metaphors as usual: as soon as Upendra croaks, the female chorus begins, and A COMPUTERIZED WHITE DOVE FLIES OUT OF HIS CHEST AND FLIES INTO THE SKY!!!!!!!!!!!!! And we burst out laughing, of course. It was the equivalent of having something fly out of his ass at the most inopportune moment. THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is what it sounds like (i.e., us laughing) When Doves Fly.