Tubelight ka Chaand

Rarely does a film achieve 'perfection': in the sense that you are amazed by each and every trick, technique and turn of the film. For a live action short film, to do that is even much, much more difficult: and Shlok Sharma's stunningly beautiful film Tubelight ka Chaand (English title: Tubelight's Moon) does that. It manages the kind of dreaminess and awe that the Russian animation short Hedgehog in the Fog does and that watching a field of stars from a lonely camp in the countryside's cold night does.

Set to beautiful music, the film is a rarity in that India, even though a powerhouse of cinema, including some very good cinema, is not the place for short films. They are not really appreciated and watched; or let me rephrase: they are not really known by Indians. The paisa vasool nature of Indians does not allow them to appreciate that they barely spent 10 minutes or 20 minutes and yet got something that maybe a 3-hour-long film couldn't have given them: yet short films are made, in dozens, especially by those passing out of FTII. But, somehow, just like much of contemporary Indian literature in English, those shorts are lost often amidst causes and a desire of voicing out their opinions and concerns. On the contrary, here, Sharma simply tells a beautiful story: and in the process also pokes fun at media and its circus, using also references to Peepli! Live and Delhi 6.

The film deals with that eternal human quest: romance. Love at first sight: often one of the purest forms of love. Not love based on judgements, on trials of living together and comfort, on the other's degree of humour or wit or intelligence, on the alike thinking of the other. Not love that can be dismantled at the first whiff of averse weather, of the incipience of feeling of loss of adventure. But the film celebrates the truest love: love at first sight, and loyalty that often is consequent to it, love that celebrates itself as the greatest adventure, and hence cannot die. Because here the protagonist boy truly finds the complement in terms of the beauty he loves and searches for, and finds it in an external object: rather than the supplement, which today goes by the name of loving and love.

Tubelight's Moon is a film that does not shy from being beautiful.

As of the time of writing, the complete film can be watched at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2TgRz5Mjuk