Rang De Whatever You See

I went to school tonight. I bought myself a ticket three days back. Reserved a seat.

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Going through a boisterous crowd of people I entered the cinema hall. As soon as I walked through the lobby, I found people and their minds colliding. Strangely, we stood there before the gates, waiting, looking around, and sharing that space, also sharing a mind space. The mind which has been subjected to a busy day, traffic, noise, office matters, making money, ignoring the beggar, family and so on.

Then we lurk through the corridors and find our numbered seats. As soon as the film begins the scattered crowd sits in clumped together to watch what they have paid for but not yet experienced. The producers are glad the crowd did not take the word of a reviewer or a critique or a friend but instead took the effort to come and find out for themselves. Now, only if we had this similar, fantastic approach to all the other matters, like bills passed in parliament, BMC dis-approvals, Society matters, unscientific orthodox beliefs, men and women being raped in our very neighbourhood, your child complaining about an uncle who…

The crowd becomes a collective, closes the day out and gets clued to the visuals and sounds of the film and very soon the classroom is in order: attentive and concentrated, if the lesson is good. Pin drop silence - if the lesson is being registered. Soon there aren’t any people in the hall, just one large mass of people focused on a singular experience.

The subject that seems to most touch our minds is “revolution”, “change”. We stand up and look if someone has made a change or if someone is pointing a way out from the chaos. We applaud our hero because we have appointed him to symbolise our hopes. We almost consider him a messiah.

A time may come when, maybe, one evening I would find that my day was perfect. That my boss did not forget to clap my back since independence, that a car driving on the road allowed the pedestrian to cross first and the others didn’t honk during the act. That walking on the roads under tree shade is a pleasure I would not give up for an oil guzzling, fume reeking car. That I have suddenly acquired the ability to remember the promise I made to anyone, anyone… especially myself.

That when I go to a cinema hall, people will be most courteous to greet a fellow stranger with a smile or even a hand shake, to allow women and children to walk ahead, not find anyone screaming down the ushers neck if they cannot find their seats. Its not far when one day we may consider going to a cinema an act of piety.

The subject was gripping as it had all the possible shades of common emotions; we have been made familiar to in the past lessons. It does not detour from those and works better on the lights, the colours go sepia making the experience nostalgic, invoking the spirit of freedom to come alive. And, believe me when Aamir Khan says the dialogue “we stand with one leg in the future and the other in the past and piss on our present”…the audience breaks into whistles and claps, the kinds which say – hey man, you got us pinned right there man!!!.

The film spoke to us about what we all go through in our everyday lives. One felt the same helplessness as the five plus one youth of men and woman, were portraying on the screen. It was happening in every home – fathers stopping their children from roaming the streets, stopping ‘change’ from inhaling a breath. The subject was uncomfortable, as it pointed to our limitations. Reminding us that I am one in a crowd of millions…I do not opt for change but I don’t mind seeing a utopian possibility, or watching fools go ahead and blow their lives away. Then we can come out; have a candy bar to comfort our self. We say – “It’s only a film, after all”. We carry on crying and ranting. We carry on in the struggle to find meaning to life. Find Babajis and Gurujis to follow but find nothing in our selves to lead us.

Lead me at least to a taxiwalla and look at his face, make eye contact before I pay him and board off. Lead me to the most ill-equipped kitchen of my mother living in the village in the same country and have that one meal she wants me to have. Lead me to a set of people who have the same problems with things in the world. To figure out some way to make at least one problem better by a nano-millionth of a fraction is meta-task. Make good the name of our race as an intelligent, pioneering civilisation of this earth.

The film did all this and did send out a message, I guess, only to a few. This I was confirmed of when three adolescent boys humming the tune of the lead song and imitating Aamir Khan almost perfect, walked past me. Or is it the nature of change - to work quietly, imperceptibly? I would like to believe it is.

These boys would be men some day, haunted by questions of justice and balance, harmony and amiability and be suddenly reminded of a film they watched together, as buddies and had a glimmer of thought that perhaps that was not just a film. That perhaps what the heroes did in the film is wanting to happen out there, in the world. Now. That perhaps, they saw their future in the film and it was only providential.

Film: Rang De Basanti

Theatre: Star city, Mumbai.

Date: 11th Feb 2006

Review: ****

Political situation : ditto

MIG 21’s : ditto

Pilots dying : ditto

Media stories : ditto

Bad roads : ditto

People dying on the street : ditto

No one noticing : ditto

I go home and write : ditto

You tell me how much you liked Aamir’s acting : ditto

Cheers!

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