I was just looking through the great treasure trove that is Rajshri.com, full of the crap that they have been serving the Indian public for the past 50+ years. I have to say, inspite of the shit that they have up there, they have really done a good job of at least preserving all the crap that they put out, so that people like me can, on idle weekend afternoons, go back to those images and laugh a little so that we can forget the blistering heat and the loneliness... alright, alright, coming back to the point.

From all the Timepass pages before, and from all the other pages on this site, and from all the "airs" that you might think I put on, it may not be obvious that I actually happen to LIKE some of the stuff I make fun of.

My mother and her family were big fans of Rafi, for one thing, and it gets passed on. I don't like ALL the Rafi songs, but I like quite a few of them. (my dad came back from Bahrain with shitloads of Rafi and Mukesh casettes, with all the Mukesh songs of heartbreak, rejection, pain and suffering, but that is another story, a long one.) I really like the Rafi song that goes, "Ab kya misaal doon main tumhare shabaab ki"... but I guess throughout the time that I liked this song, I always knew in the back of my mind who it was picturised on. "Who", you ask, after you hear the song, and understand all the Urdu that is being thrown at you, "was this beautiful damsel being described in the song?" The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. Well, actually, its right here:

http://www.rajshri.com/lyric30.html

Check it out. In retrospect, I have to scream, WHY, Rafi, WHY?!?!? Actually, I guess I should be screaming WHY, Pradeep Kumar?! Goddamn you, WHY? I know you are Bong, and that probably means you have really bad taste - dried Sandesh and all - but still, GODDAMN YOU, did you have to ruin such a great song by singing it to Meena fucking Kumari?!!

So, here's my anti-Meena Kumar page. Here goes.

First of all, what the FUCK was it with people? Couldn't they see that she was ugly?! People will come to her defense and say, "Come on, in those days, we didn't go by a person's looks, those were the days when actors actually KNEW how to act and they didn't have to look beautiful, because they were actually playing the part quite well!"

And yes, that is a valid argument. Remember how in the early days of Hindi cinema, you had these people who sung their own songs, did their own dubbing, and sometimes had to do their own stunts? And now, sometimes (and not all the time, which is the difference between me and some old fogey who thinks the Golden Age lasted from 1940 to 1955 or something like that) you have people that may be good-looking, but can't act if someone held a gun to their head. Hell, there are STILL some people who (a) are fugly (b) can't act (c) don't do pretty much else.... Then there are those people who are supposedly good-looking (yuck) and people tend to believe when they see them on camera that they can REALLY act ("See his eyes", a good friend remarks EVERY TIME we have this discussion, "you can see that he is REALLY emoting, they are VERY expressive"... Yes, I'm sure that his expressive eyes were very helpful when he had to act in the scene where a medical miracle cures him of his brain tumour and cures his dad of his heart problem or something and instead kills his mom and restores his girlfriend's eyesight - if you don't know what movie I am talking about, and if you don't know WHO has these "expressive" eyes, I'm sorry, you will have to find out on your own)

BUT: Even during the so-called "Golden Age", there were people who really didn't do nothing great. They were highly over-rated. Example: Meena Kumari.

Seriously, now. Does anyone left on this earth consider her good-looking?

Seriously, now, did she or did she not cry in EVERY movie she was in?

And when she cried, didn't she also play the SAME role in every movie?

Pick a Meena Kumari movie at random, and this is probably what you will see. There will be a linear combination of the following things happening:

1) She was in love with some not-so-bad-looking dude like Rajendra Kumar (honestly, he's a lot better looking than... here he comes...) or Pradeep Kumar, but because of "society" and because she is an "Indian woman", she sacrifices her love and marries some other dude who might be a social worker (Ashok Kumar in Aarti, the movie under consideration on this page) or just some no-talent ass-clown like Raj Kumar's character in Dil Ek Mandir. Compare the stories of these two movies. In DEM, she is in love with Rajendra Kumar who turns out to be a.... doctor. In Aarti, the doctor is played by Pradeep Kumar (even though I don't really remember this movie, I am SURE that it wasn't Ashok Kumar who played the lover, and I can ONLY imagine Pradeep Kumar singing this wonderful Rafi song to such a whiny bitch)...

2) Once she's married, she moves in with the husband's family (which invariably is a joint family), where she suffers a lot of verbal (and sometimes physical) abuse from the other members, usually the mother-in-law (ALWAYS played by Lalita Pawar) or sometimes the sister-in-law (as it is in Aarti, apparently: Ashok Kumar's brother's wife.)

3) At some point in the movie, WHILE her husband happens to be away on vacation or a tour of some sort (saala, aisa wife rahega to vacation nahin lega to aur kya karega!), Lalita Pawar accuses her of theft or adultery (usually the latter), at which point the crying whining Meena Kumari screams, "Maa jee! Yeh aap kya keh rahi hain!" To which Lalita Pawar replies, "Arri neech, KULTA! (Yes, friends and neighbours, that's how I learnt of the existence of this hilarious word, Kulta, I learnt it from watching Lalita Pawar in action. Even now, whenever I think of the word Kulta, the faces of LP and MK immediately show up inside my head.) Shaadishuda hote hue ghair mardon ke saath gulcharrey udaati hai! Nikal jaa is ghar se! Aur kabhi apna kaala mooh hamein mat dikhaana!" and, with or without the help of some muscular servant (usually, there's either an old servant - Ramu Kaka - who sympathizes with Meena Kumari, but can't lift a finger against his mistress Lalita Pawar, or sometimes Lalita Pawar's hen-pecked husband watching helplessly as Meena Kumari is being kicked out of the house)

4) She is widowed at a young age (either that, or her husband or younger brother dies in the whirlpool in the river while boating - watch Kaajal - or something like that - for details) and gets married to a husband who according to the filmmakers is ayyaash (even though it is only Raj Kumar, and all he wants to do is just have a few pegs before dinner and a few more after dinner, and he only tries to make her drink a sip or something, while singing another Rafi song: "Choo lene do naazuk hothon ko") that she reforms on her own without complaining to her brothers - because, after all, she is the sati-fucking-savitri - or, eventually while the rest of the town dies of plague, someone - the hero, this time played by Dharmendra in Phool Aur Patthar - comes accidentally to her rescue while he tries to burgle the rest of the town or something like that.

5) And PLEASE. The next time someone comes up to me and says, "Pakeezah was a landmark film", I swear, it will take ten men to hold me back from punching them in the face. Again and again.
 

I forgot where I was going with all this, but the fact remains: Meena Kumari was an irritating, whiny, overrated, no-talent ass-clown, despite her missing a finger on her left hand or something like that. (or maybe my mom just made that story up)

And yes, if you read the story of the movie Aarti on the Rajshri homepage (link was somewhere at the top of this page, if you missed it you are also as retarded as her sister-in-law in the movie), you will notice the similarity between this story and Dil Ek Mandir... her husbands suffers from some ailment that ONLY her ex-boyfriend can cure ("There's a hole in my heart that can only be filled by you..." - Extreme)... And once the boyfriend comes back into the picture, he of course wants her back in his life (I wonder why he even bothers, he should consider himself lucky he lost this piece of crap!)
.......
(And oh, feel free to stop me ANYTIME you think the plot reminds you a little bit of Casablanca, by the way!)
.......
Anyway, towards the end of the movie, she is forced to choose between her husband and ex-boyfriend. I don't know how Aarti ends (although I can guess, from the climax of Dil Ek Mandir, and from the spoiler on the Rajshri.com website - "Watch the movie to answer these queries in this story of triumph of sacrifice over self")... but this is how DEM ends:

Rajendra Kumar, the ex-boyfriend, who was healthy throughout the movie (as far as I can remember) manages to cure Raj Kumar's cancer, and DIES OF A HEART ATTACK at the convenient time - on his desk in his office, just before Raj Kumar can come thank him, or something like that. I remember that at the end, while the title song plays in the background, maybe the happy couple build a temple or something for Rajendra Kumar or maybe they just give a huge endowment to the hospital or some shit like that.

Even though my hatred of Meena Kumari knows very few bounds, there are some times when I am not as acrimonius when watching her on TV. The reason: Pradeep Kumar, dressed either in the Mughal attire or in his '50s outfit, with the trousers pulled up all the way to his neck. That dude, with his pencil-thin moustache, is hilarious. Example: one fine Sunday morning, when I was busy getting ready to get out of the house, and my mom was watching some Mughal flick with PK and MK. I passed by, and this is what I saw:

PK is standing in his backyard, checking out the flowers or something, waxing lyrical about the beauty of nature and also dreaming of his future dream girl. MK, undetected by PK, is sitting on the wall that her house shares with PK's. She just got out of the shower (just like me, when I was watching this scene) and is apparently drying her hair. She flicks her hair in one direction, and a few drops of water land on PK's arm. He looks at the drops, and exclaims, in his normal but bewildered voice, "Arrey? Barsaat?", at which point I totally lost it, and started laughing so loud that my mom requested me to kindly vacate the premises so that she could watch her Sunday morning movie in peace, but after a space of ten seconds, she was laughing with me as well.

If the Urdu ass-monkey poets that wrote the story of that movie thought they could, in prose, compare the water drizzling from MK's hair onto PK's arm as a soft rain, they failed that Sunday afternoon.

Moral of the story: Please don't say Meena Kumari was beautiful, and please don't say she had talent. And please, DONT every try to see the picturized version of the song "Ab kya misaal doon..." because it will ruin the song.