Watching Oriya Movies

Fondness grows with distance (don’t know if it works in all cases). During my recent visit to my home state, my uprooted mobile identity created nostalgic feelings about Oriya films. Oriya films were the most precious and rarely available sources of entertainment during my childhood days. I grew up in country side where there was no electricity until 1996. Although there was no television, news from one village to the other traveled very fast. The news of video shows or film screening in other villages used to create unending excitement among the children and adults of my village. The video show generally starts at 9 in the evening, for which we, the film lovers, ask our mothers or sisters to prepare the evening meal quite early so that we will not be late for the film. If we get the news about the video shows early, we sleep for some hours during the day to prepare ourselves for the unending entertainment night. We often carry sensor, so that we can use it to break our sleep. Since my village was a small one, we used to collect 10 rupees from each family to run video shows in our village. If someone is willing to pay some extra money we also pay special attention for their request of movies. Growing up in a village was, in retrospect, indeed an exciting experience.


I had not seen Oriya movies for long time. Unlike Bollywood, Oriya film industry is very small and undeveloped for which you can not even find any of the movies online. During my recent visit to Orissa, I was eager and decided to watch an Oriya movie and see how it is. I was visiting my sister’s place in Puri which is one of the most sacred places for Hindus in India. It is also one of the most beautiful places situated at the coast of Bay of Bengal. The place is very pleasant in the evening with the wild roaring sea waves, gentle breeze, and serenity of atmosphere. I love spending my evenings in the beach whenever I visit my sister’s place. But this time I decided to watch an Oriya movie instead of going to the beach. I thought I could go to the beach even after the movie which was supposed to be over by 9 p.m. My elder brother was with me. When I told my intention to watch movies, everybody was surprised. Why Oriya movies? However, I was adamant. My bother could not tell anything although he was not happy with my decision. He very much wanted to spend the evening at the sea.

Finally, we went for the 6.15 p.m. show. The name of the movie was Mun Sapanar Soudagar (I am the merchant of dreams). I was surprised to see the show house-full. The movie was a copy of one of the Hindi movies where a secret and psychotic lover tries to buy his dreams and turns it into reality. I don’t anymore remember the names of the actors. It’s a love triangle, where a girl and boy love each other very much. The boy is a friend of girl’s brother. Nobody else in either family knows about this love affair. There is another rich but orphan, who secretly loves the same girl. She has become his dream girl. The situation has become such that he cannot live without her. He has been following the girl and his lover and threatening the girl to leave the guy. Since she did not listen, the secret lover kidnapped the girl’s actual lover. After kidnapping him, he comes with a marriage proposal to the girl’s house and eventually the girl’s family agrees with the proposal. The girl could not tell about his love affair because her elder sister had run away with one her brother’s friend. Thinking that it might make her brother angry, the girl accepted the proposal. The actual lover comes back after the girl’s marriage.

After marriage, the secret-psychotic lover starts torturing the girl. It becomes so unbearable that the girl’s brother brings his sister back to their own house. The psychotic lover gets angry, kills the girl’s brother and takes her away. The psychotic lover met an accident and got killed. The girl saw him dead. The police also declared him dead. She became a widow. After few days, her marriage got fixed with the ex-lover. It is at this exciting moment, the dead psychotic lover comes alive and again starts threatening her. But none believed her as he had already been declared and seen dead. He even kidnapped the bride on the day of her marriage and kept her in a secret place. The psychotic lover burnt the house and throws a dead girl’s body into the fire who was dressed up exactly in the same way the bride was. Everybody thought the bride was dead. But in the end, the bride manages to send messages from the secret location and the ex-lover comes to rescue her. A fight occurs between the ex-lover and the supposedly dead husband. In the end, the psychotic and supposedly dead husband kills himself saying the girl that “I can’t live without you and you can’t live without him. I love you so much that I can’t even kill you”. The film ends with the altruistic end of a psychotic lover who forcibly wanted to buy his dreams and make them reality.

The movie was boring and badly made. I liked the actress of the movie who was quite pretty with her slender frame, flower beauty and incredible gracefulness. In the end, I, however, regretted spending three hours in the theatre and wished I had spent the time in the beach. My glasshouse of nostalgia shattered into pieces. Before throwing the stone, I had perhaps forgotten that I am inside the glasshouse and my feelings are fragile.