What to do when you have a craving for Chinese food at 3 am

The other day I was talking to a friend on msn, and weirdly enough, we were discussing friendship, and I said: “...that's the whole point of a friend: they stand by your side, they support/defend you...”

Then I watched Lage Raho Munnabhai (Keep at it, Munnabhai) and I realized that I was just so wrong. Friendship is about more than just caring and support; true friendship means kidnapping a Chinese cook from a hotel when your friend has a hankering for Chinese food.

See, Munna (Sanjay Dutt), a local goon, is apologizing to his best friend/ lieutenant, Circuit (Arshad Warsi), for hitting him: “I have to apologize to you. I haven’t slept half the night; all these old memories were whirling in my head. Remember when I was shot in the belly? I couldn’t sleep, and I told you I missed mother? You put my head on your lap and sang me lullabies. And then I raised my hand to you? ... Remember that time I told you I wanted to eat Chinese food at 3 am? You went and kidnapped the Chinese cook from that 5 star hotel. (pause) What delicious Hakka noodles those were, no?”

None of my friends have ever offered to kidnap a chinese cook when I want Chinese. Nooo, they insist on going to a restaurant and paying for the food.

*sulk*

Jokes aside, Lage Raho Munnabhai is one of the funniest and most heartfelt movies to come out of Bollywood in the past few years. Rang de Basanti had the message, but not the humour, and Sanjay Dutt’s befuddled Munna is eminently more relatable than Aamir Khan’s angry DJ. It has the same basic message as Anupam Kher’s Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara – ie, that it is more important to keep Gandhian values in our hearts than to erect statues and memorials – but unlike the latter movie, LRM is neither a lecture nor a guilt-trip. MGKNM, while wonderfully acted, had an undeniably moral-science-lesson feel to it. LRM, on the other hand, has characters whose very fallibility endears them to us. When Munna is slapped once, he turns the other cheek, because Bapu said so. But when the other cheek is slapped, he dishooms the slapper, because, after all, Gandhiji never said what to do when both cheeks were slapped, right? As Munna might have put it: apun tere ko bolta hai ki ye ekdum mast picture hai.

Plus LRM has this guy in a cameo role. There was much screaming chez Sharon when he showed up. (Screencaps by Maja, who will henceforth be referred to as the BEST. SCREENCAPPER. EVER.)

PS - If you do watch it, or have already watched it, and Hindi is not a language with which you’re that familiar, I’m wondering whether the subtitles do a good job of differentiating between Munna and Circuit’s tapori-speak and every one else’s standard Bombay Hindi. I’m just curious if they caught that distinction, because a lot of the funny came from that.