The Heart Wants What It Wants

One of my friends was—and proudly still is—a diehard fan of actor Prabhas. We used to joke that if she ever had a son, she would have no choice but to name him Prabhas. (Then again, fandom knows no gender: I also know a guy so devoted to Shah Rukh Khan that he named his firstborn Aryan, and is seriously hoping to complete the set with Suhana and AbRam.) Back to my friend... it was through her that I first got pulled into the Telugu cinema vortex. Mirchi was the gateway drug. For months, Prabhas—in crisp off-white formals—lived on my laptop screen as wallpaper. Prabhas let's say was my moodboard.

I grew up watching Rajinikanth movies like a maniac, with Padayappa becoming a constant companion—watched over fifty times and still not stopping. That larger-than-life charisma shaped a devotion that was as much about spectacle and myth as it was about the man himself. Yet, it’s never just about the stars themselves. Sometimes obsession spills over into the movies that frame them or the songs that carry their aura, each form a distinct way of claiming a piece of that intensity.

When Mahanati was released, I found myself drawn to narrative that held a mirror to brilliance and its fragility. I watched it five times in theatres, twice on consecutive days. The story of Savithri. The actress, the comet, the woman undone by the same light she radiated, struck something deeper. Every time "gelupuleni samaram..."(a battle that can't be won..) played, I wept. I knew that feeling of fighting battles you cannot win but fight anyway, the loneliness of brilliance, the mess of loving deeply in a world that punishes emotional excess.

Obsession thus takes various forms. Any form of obsession, I now believe, is one of the earliest forms of self-recognition. Especially for girls. Especially when it came to desires. We weren’t trained to express desire in overt ways. So we clung to the safety of pop culture. 

Hrithik Roshan and Madhavan occupied the collective teenage imagination of my 90s generation. When "ek pal ka jeena" blared from the television, and Hrithik swaggered onto that dimly lit dance floor—we swooned. And when Maddy with that half-smile, tilted his head and said, "yosichu sollu..'', we all started 'yosichifying' everything.

Looking back, I don’t think we were just swooning over stars. We were also watching how the world responded to their confidence, their beauty, their mess. Sometimes we wanted them. Sometimes we wanted to be them. Often, we didn’t know where one ended and the other began.

To be obsessed was to allow ourselves to feel fully. Not watching the rain, but getting drenched in it. They offered portals into our desire, our loneliness, our courage. They revealed things we cannot yet articulate.

But lately I notice something quieter, a little sad. Women I know speak of their obsessions in the past tense: "I used to be mad about Hrithik... haha, childish no?" They became mothers, wives, professionals — women who have 'matured', and whose nostalgia was now required to come wrapped in irony or apology.

But I wonder — why is emotional intensity something to 'get over'? Who decided that a life of sensible responsibilities should replace that heady, irrational, beautiful ache of obsession?

So the question I’ve been sitting with is this:
Why do we obsess?
And then the harder one:
Why do we let go?

Last week, my friend talked about a colleague, a girl in her late twenties who had never watched Alaipayuthey. Her father, marked by Malayali intellectual refinement, dismissed Tamil cinema as loud, excessive, lacking class. Her college friends mirrored this disdain. Cinema, for them, had to prove its intelligence. So she missed the fever of Tamil pop films. But last day, on my friend's recommendation, she finally saw Alaipayuthey — and said in disbelief: “What all did I miss!!”

What she missed wasn’t just a film. She missed a cultural moment. She missed a collective language of longing and rebellion.

And more importantly—she missed permission.

I have studied about Pierre Bourdieu's ideas on social and cultural capital, especially how taste acts as a gatekeeper of class distinction. But this incident revealed something more intimate about what he meant when he said taste is never neutral. Taste, I’ve come to see, is not only about class. It is a gatekeeping device shaped by class, caste, gender, language, education, alike. It tells you what to love and what to hide. And if you’re not careful, convinces you that your heart’s longings are somehow lesser. It deepens, moving beyond class to enter the terrain of gender. And there, the politics of taste becomes politics of obsession.

Who gets to obsess without shame? Whose obsessions are called fandom, and whose dismissed as foolishness? 

At the heart of female desire—especially desire for public figures or celebrities we’ll never meet—lies a profound dilemma. On the one hand, feminist discourse warns us of how our wants have been sculpted by patriarchy. We are taught to desire the desirable man: chiseled, heterosexual, emotionally elusive, dominant but redeemable. To love him, to long for him, is to affirm the gaze we are trying to resist. On the other hand, the desire is real. Visceral. I remember the exact moment Hrithik Roshan walked onto the screen in Kaho Naa... Pyaar Hai. His body, impossibly sculpted, announcing a new benchmark of beauty. I was not calculating political correctness when I stared at that jawline.

For us women, obsession is a site of double estrangement. Patriarchy warns us against obsession because it makes us ungovernable. Feminism, meanwhile, cautions us against internalizing the male gaze. Either way, our attachments are suspect.

So what do we do with this contradiction? Simply put: to look or not to look? To obsess, or not?

Feminist theory offers no easy answers. 

But is it really a question of whether we should or shouldn’t desire Hrithik, or whether that desire aligns with or resists patriarchy? I think, the deeper question is more unsettling: Can a woman truly desire, freely, without first wondering if her desire is permitted?

Because growing up, most women aren’t really allowed to be loud about their obsessions. Boys could plaster their walls with bikini-clad actresses and call it adolescence. Girls who said they loved Maddy or Vijay were met with arched eyebrows. Such frivolity. The subtext: Real women don't lose their heads over silly stars.

This is where Bourdieu's theory of taste becomes hauntingly relevant. He argued that what we like, or what we are allowed to like, isn’t a personal choice but a social inheritance. We are trained in taste the way we are trained in table manners. We perform it to belong. Which means that desire—yes, even desire for a movie star—is already a political terrain.

But what if obsession becomes, but a form of resistance? Obsession says: I want what I want, and I won’t apologize for it. That is not an emotional indulgence, it’s a political statement. Especially when it defies stipulated codes. A girl obsessing over Tamil masala films is challenging the invisible curriculum of 'good taste.' She is proclaiming loudly that beauty, joy, charisma, seduction, and emotional maximalism are legitimate aesthetic values.

When she falls in love with a star like Madhavan — as a symbol of everything soft and possible and safe in masculinity — she is rejecting the cold stoicism of so-called real men. She is crafting a version of love that isn’t handed to her by manuals.

Even desire, in this light, becomes a terrain of agency. A girl obsessing over Hrithik’s perfect body is not just reproducing patriarchy. She is also reclaiming her right to look. To want. To experience pleasure in seeing, not just being seen.

To stay obsessed is to remember a time when we sang — the heart wants what it wants. It is to say: I still want. I still feel. And this, I insist, is feminist. Because obsession (when it’s not shaped for the male gaze or market desire) is where we practiced longing, before we ever had the language for it. It’s where we first encountered beauty that made our hearts ache. It’s where we rehearsed defiance against our parents’ rules, against the syllabus, against the shame around want.

Don’t laugh at those versions of us who stayed up late collecting magazine cutouts, memorizing dialogues, rewatching films just to feel something again. In a world that disciplines, staying obsessed is radical. Loving something too much is political. And keeping that fire alive is not immaturity, it is faithfulness. 

So go dance to 'Ek Pal Ka Jeena..' like no one’s watching. Or cry quietly to 'Gelupuleni Samaram..' like your heart remembers. Either way, don’t apologise.

                                   

Endnote:

This essay is offered from a place of personal reflection and experience. It does not attempt to speak for all communities or identities — including but not limited to varied caste groups, gender identities, sexual orientations, diverse class backgrounds, linguistic and regional affiliations, or religious and ethnic contexts. Each of these dimensions profoundly shapes how desire, obsession, and cultural taste are experienced and understood.

To speak beyond one’s positionality risks erasure, misrepresentation, or oversimplification of others realities. Out of profound respect for this complexity, I have chosen to write within the ethical boundaries of my lived experience.