The experience of watching Dabangg 2

As many people already know, Bollywood movies are  big in Asia and Nepal is no exception. Bollywood movies run in theaters in Nepal more that Nepali films, as far as I know.

Even when I used to live in Nepal, I hardly went to cinemas. I used to look at cinema as total waste of my time and money and if it was Bollywood movies, then it was waste of more than 3 hours of my life. So I have never been a big fan of watching Bollywood movies in cinema. If I get good reviews from my friends, I get the movie at home so I can fast forward songs or anything I don’t feel like watching. Also, the DVDs  have subtitles which help me a lot to understand the dialogues.

While in Pokhara, we normally had lots of time in the evening as it got dark early in winter and the hotel also had load shedding so we couldn’t do much or even watch TV. So one evening while we were there, we decided to go for a movie. My MIL was keen to watch Dabangg 2, a Bollywood movie sequel of the successful movie Dabangg.

So my FIL decided to call his friend who owns a cinema complex in Pokhara. He just asked him if it would be possible to reserve 5 seats for us for the evening show of Dabangg 2, just to make sure that we got tickets once we reach the cinema.

 After the conversation we drove from our hotel to the cinema hall asking for directions several times to the passers-by as the place was far from where our hotel was. After more than 30 minutes’ drive, we were finally greeted by this friend at the gate of the cinema. As we parked we noticed that there was no one in the cinema hall and the whole building seemed empty and dark.

The owner asked us to come upstairs and we all were introduced to him. He seemed pleased to meet my FIL and was addressing AS as Mr Engineer when he spoke to him (In Nepal, many people used that term to address AS). We sat on the lounge and he ordered tea for us while FIL and few other people from cinema had conversed.

The whole cinema complex was dark expect the place we were in. So my FIL asked why there was no one there. His friend then told us that in Pokhara, they are not doing night shows as the movie had been on for many weeks and night show was not popular in the winter. So my FIL said that it was ok that if the night shows was not running then he did not want to touble his friend and we could leave but his friend insisted on running the movie just for us. And to top of that, there was no power so the movie was running on generators.

Once we finished our tea, we were escorted to one of their halls and asked to seat anywhere we liked. We chose the best seats in the house. Me, AS, MIL and FIL sat in one row while our driver dai sat on another one. The owner and few other people sat behind us and the movie started. I am not sure when but the owner and other people left while the movie was running so at point when I turn around it was only 5 of us in this big cinema hall. With the movie running for nearly 4 weeks they must have watched it numerous times already!

As usual the movie turned out to be a full-fledged Bollywood movie with songs every 20 minutes and unbelievable fight sequence every 10 minutes. I was a bit annoyed that there were no subtitles as I couldn’t understand some parts of the movie. But apart from me, everyone seemed to enjoy the movie and we had a great experience of watching the movie with just the five us in the whole theatre.