Are Your Instincts Always Right?
The deepest Bollywood movie you've never heard of.
Instincts are everything–or are they? In business and in life, we are often told that the facts on the sheet matter more than our own intuitions do. Which approach is better?
Today I’m seeking answers from Bollywood, specifically from the critically panned but later beloved movie Aiyyaa, released in 2012. The film opens with a retro song-and-dance sequence performed by our charming young heroine Meenakshi, played by lauded Indian actress Rani Mukerji. She is singing this song, we discover, in her dreams, which is where Meenakshi lives most of her life.
Now before you question my Bollywood bona fides, you should know that I have technically been in the Bollywood space since about kindergarten. My parents didn’t have cable when I was young but we did randomly get the channel that played Bollywood movies. Linguistically and culturally I am watching these films in translation, which according to some scholars transforms these movies into entirely different products. Aiyyaa was famous for its pastiche of songs from older Indian cinema. Foreign viewers like me miss those references, but as a result we have room to focus on the film’s wider themes of romantic love and female independence.
Meenakshi has the talent and beauty to be a star, but her material circumstances create a depressing clamper over her dreams. Meenakshi’s depressed father smokes multiple cigarettes at once through a dinky, harmonica-like contraption. Her brother is obsessed with the stray dogs in their Mumbai neighborhood and he dreams of saving them. Meenakshi’s mother schemes constantly for an arranged marriage against her daughter’s will. All the while, Meenakshi’s disabled grandmother cruises around in a motorized scooter while maniacally laughing, displaying her full set of gold teeth. The family lives next to the local garbage dump; it’s an oppressive environment for someone who wants more out of life.
As a first step towards independence, Meenakshi lands a job at the library of an arts university. Scenes are filmed on-location at the beautiful, leafy Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai. There is a feeling of coolness and respite in this quiet place dappled with shade. It is there where she falls in love at first sight with mysterious art student Surya.
Actually, she smells him before she sees him, and throughout the movie Surya’s fragrance precedes his physical appearance. We are meant to understand that Meenakshi is receiving multi-sensory, intuitive information that Surya is “The One.” Her intuitive moments often occur as “Mahek Bhi,” from the film’s short, terrific original score by Bollywood composer Amit Trivedi, plays in the background. It’s a sparkling, softly dreamy track that deftly captures Meenakshi’s romance with both life and Surya, and it embodies the exuberant, distinctly feminine perspective driving the movie.
On the visual plane Surya is also very appealing. He is tall, dark, and handsome, and he doesn’t say much, which adds to his inscrutability. We find out he is Tamil, so this match would be boundary-crossing for Meenakshi’s Marathi family. Meenakshi starts teaching herself Tamil; we see her learning how to count and how to express her preference for darker-complexioned men.
Meenakshi follows Surya everywhere at a distance. Meanwhile at home, the noose is tightening regarding her arranged marriage. Her parents identify a match, and everyone bulldozes forward with it while Meenakshi is clearly dismayed. Her parents view an arranged marriage as a way for her to survive, while Meenakshi wants to forge her own path forward. Intergenerational beliefs about what is and isn’t possible in life–especially for women–are hard to break, but champions appear in unexpected places. When Meenakshi escapes a wedding planning meeting, her grandmother, riding in her scooter, poignantly calls after her: “Meenakshi, run! I couldn’t run! Run!”
As the wedding approaches, Surya finally lets himself be caught by Meenakshi’s love. She follows him to what turns out to be his family’s paint factory. This whole time, she has been catching the scent of color essences on Surya’s body. They conclude the movie happily engaged.
Despite the celebrations, there is a feeling of unease. Why did it take a Bollywood movie-length of time for Surya to acknowledge Meenakshi’s existence? We watch Surya act rudely and dismissively throughout the film. He ignores Meenakshi frequently before finally declaring his love for her. Is Meenakshi working out some childhood baggage on him, or is he really “The One”?
We don’t get to find out if Meenakshi’s instincts about Surya were correct, but we can watch the consequences of instinctually-driven romantic decisions unfold elsewhere. Last year the New Yorker ran a provocative profile of University of Chicago philosophy professor Agnes Callard, a public intellectual who left a stable marriage after falling in love with her graduate student Arnold Brooks. After she and her now-husband Brooks confessed their love:
Agnes said, “It felt like I was having a revelation in the clouds.” For the first time in her life, she felt as if she had access to a certain “inner experience of love,” a state that made her feel as if there were suddenly a moral grail, a better kind of person to be. She realized that within her marriage she didn’t have this experience. If she stayed married, she would be pretending.
Callard left her then-husband Ben Callard shortly thereafter. Her ex-husband calls Callard “the least complacent person I’ve ever met.”
How is the new marriage going? It turns out that with heightened passion comes heightened conflict. The profile notes: “Within a few months, they saw that in many ways they were incompatible.” Regarding his new wife, Brooks reflects: “‘Most people, myself included, would have met the realization with the thought: How could I have stepped into this with such naïveté, with such childish blindness? But her [Callard’s] instinct was to trust that initial experience.’”
When asked if the reality of this new marriage has lived up to her initial instincts, Callard says, “I think there was something right in that vision…but it has been so much harder than I thought it would be. To change—but also just to be in love, like, to relate in a really loving way to another person. It’s like once you start trying to do that you come up against all of your limits.” There are things about herself that Callard is now forced to see. She says: “I think I never realized how fundamentally selfish I was before I met Arnold.”
Brooks seems less surprised than Callard by the disjuncture between ideals and reality. When she wants to turn back the clock to their initial ecstatic romance, she says, “Arnold will be, like, ‘That was never there.’ He is offended by my attempt to go back in time. And I feel like he is taking away the foundation of our relationship and telling me that our lives are built on a lie.”
This relationship has its fair share of tension. Callard admits that in this respect, “It’s a less happy relationship than the one I had” with her ex-husband. When journaling about her new marriage, Callard writes that “So many things get ‘let go of’ rather than really resolved.”
So in Bollywood and in real life, here we have two women who have unapologetically followed their instincts despite the circumstances. Their shared ability to take drastic action defies longstanding cultural tropes about men being the supposed romantic pursuers. I wonder if women don’t get enough credit for how much we really are the movers and shakers here and elsewhere in our lives.
I recently attended a Torah class during which the teacher, a young and very talented woman, was telling the room about the Curse of Eve. As a result of having led Adam to sin by giving him forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, God punishes Eve—and all future women—by saying: “I will greatly expand your hard labor—and your pregnancies; in hardship shall you bear children. Yet your urge shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”
Across gender lines, everyone in the class could agree that pregnancy and childbirth are still painful and dangerous for women. People hadn’t really thought about that second line, though.
Our teacher explained that men tend to “rule” over the timing and circumstances of romantic relationships and marriage. According to her, women want to create marriages and families more urgently than men do, and so women will take more decisive action to achieve those things (and at a faster pace) than men will. When asked what women can do to subvert this curse, our teacher said that women should resist the urge to control things. Women, she said, should draw in men with their female essences, kind of like gentle whirlpools or vacuum cleaners.
Far be it from me to make any judgments about vacuum cleaners and the like. As a woman running a new business, however, I have to say that this moment has given me an even greater appreciation for intuition and instincts than I had previously.
Starting your own venture is an oddly romantic experience. It makes you suffer, but it also greatly expands your ideas about what you–and life–are capable of calling into being. Instincts matter, and they have important things to say. But of course, instincts are far less murky to interpret when you are a sole proprietor.
Dvir Cahana, incoming Rabbi of Base Miami
Eli Weinbach, heading off to Stanford University Hillel to serve as Rabbi and Director of Student Wellbeing
P.S. - I’ll be playing this Sunday in a squash tournament benefiting Israeli kids impacted by the current war. Donate here!
