The following are other instances of how art imitated life and left this writer with potent estimations of truth. In the second part of a series I had started earlier , here are the important exemplars.
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THE CLIMACTIC MORAL/ IDEOLOGICAL HEART TO HEART IN AAKROSH
AAKROSH (RAGE, 1980) is an Indian cinematic touchstone owing to its distinct ability in expressing a voice for subalterns, a social heirarchy in which tribals from forested reserves occupy the farthest, lowest rung. In this stirring screenplay written by Vijay Tendulkar, a playwright first and foremost responsible for fronting an ideological torrent in his own right with each work he penned, the Govind Nihalani directorial looks at the dehumanisation of poor, hapless tribals who subsist on bare minimum and are duly exploited by anyone who accrues a higher rank than them. The value of simmering rage is in the brilliantly realised, silent, dialogue free world essayed legendarily by Om Puri as Bhiku whose wife Nagi ( the great Smita Patil espouses its screaming soul in a cameo) is brutally assaulted and then killed by local authorities. He is eventually jailed for the crime he didn't commit.
The moral crux of the tale is in the dilemma of the lawyer ( the always brilliant Naseeruddin Shah) who represents Bhiku and in his client's sustained silences and withdrawn demeanour, complete with bulging eyes always fixed to the ground, discovers depths to which none from the educated middle class ilk will ever dive into. He takes it upon himself to collude facts and painstakingly search for the truth, eventually uncovering the wordly police - politician nexus that becomes hell bent on torturing him psychologically with threats and fear of imminent violence, literally leaving him to cower like a prey taking cover from absolute beasts. He bumbles and trips, thinking of the inconsequential manner of waging a good fight in this backwater by the seaside.
In the final portion of the film, both Bhiku and Bhaskar, that is the righteous lawyer come to see the accumulated darkness of societal ills that have been persisting for centuries. Bhiku hacks his sister to death to save her from the clutches of leery men who wouldn't bat an eyelid before handing her the same sentence as Nagi and Bhaskar witnesses that first hand along with the distressed, lonely tribal's feral scream of anguish, a howl of repressed rage against the system for which he is nothing, not even part of a statistic.
Bhaskar then has a climactic conversation with his mentor and senior (Amrish Puri), a man who always went with the tide and had advised his protégé to stray clear from controversies and local factions, in other words take his duties not too seriously and definitely not in the vein of changing the world. Here Bhaskar confronts him with mechanics of the world people like the senior lawyer themselves have helped perpetuate. The 'experienced' man tells him that his own consciousness cannot alter entrenched beliefs or wrongdoings. The young man feels the weight of letting influential people of the town get away with murder and worse, with characteristic impunity. He cannot do anything alone, says his mentor. After this heart to heart, Bhaskar has the revelation that the detached sense of respect that one accords on seniors has to be discarded. Ambiguous as this journey to get Bhiku justice is, he walks out and declares his intent to do it alone, as the film ends with a freeze frame, the most effective form of an open ended conclusion. This act, to this writer, echoes the lines by Rabindranath Tagore, 'EKLA CHOLO RE( YOU WALK ALONE)'
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A LETTERED SOUL: REFLECTIONS ON LITERATURE, CINEMA AND CULTURE .
Non-FictionI have often wondered about the very curdled natures of our opinions so much so that the perch of imagination simply becomes a bystanding abstraction and real thoughts of genuine merit slip between the fingers. That is a human tendency, to beat arou...
