Himmat karne wAlonki hAr nahin hOti
Three years ago Anupam Kher received a note that read, “You don’t belong to the category of heroes and lead actors, but we can’t not award you because that would draw everyone’s attention to our impaired judgment,” along with a Special Jury National Film Award. It was for his role in acclaimed Assamese director Jahnu Barua’s Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara, a movie which may have been unfortunately misconstrued and mismarketed as a reminder of Gandhian ideals along with a sensitive close-up look at dementia and related disorders.
Hindi literature professor Uttam Chaudhary (Anupam Kher) is forgetful. Nothing uncommon for his age. He accidentally goes to a Chemistry class and goes on about Niralaji’s humanization of Lord Rama. Then he calls his wife who died a couple of years ago at the time of his retirement. Memory ailments have been troubling him for three years now, notwithstanding his psychiatrist’s prescriptions of placebos and his dutiful daughter’s wiping of his glasses. Having crossed a barrier, his condition is rapidly worsening with each passing day. And forgetfulness is not the biggest problem anymore. Delusions are. He thinks that his house is a jail, teenaged son a jailor, house-keeper a vicious woman bent on feeding him poisoned food, and himself to have been jailed for the murder of Gandhi which he doesn’t deny but claims to be by mistake. He recognizes only his daughter Trisha (Urmila Matondkar).
Trisha is not without her problems. She can’t concentrate on her work in Pratham, is pressurized by her fiance’s impatience, and is at her wit’s end in dealing with her father. His charades whether it is getting lost in the traffic, running away from home, or setting newspapers afire in his locked room, age her face and crush her nerves.
Even though one can’t miss the implication of a strong caring woman being an NGO activist, Barua’s remaining characters are as sensitive and more real. The confusion, fear, anger, and helplessness of the teenaged son who is increasingly preoccupied by his own future were brilliantly brought out by Addy and he impressed me the most in the cast. The elder brother in his chase for the American dream has for once not abandoned his roots, economically supporting the entire family, and on becoming aware of the extent of the situation he comes down to take the mantle from his sister who is herself breaking down. The gradual change in perception of an illness in a family by all its members, and the effects it has on each of them was handled in a way I haven’t seen in an Indian movie before. (Aparna Sen’s 15 Park Avenue is another sensitive movie that comes to mind, but it is not about the family.)
Given enough focus, the thin thread where Uttam collects, hides, and sets afire to newspaper clippings containing violent crimes could have by itself implied a lot about his countrymen’s forgetfulness of everything Gandhi. Instead, Barua jumps from showing it to telling it through Uttam’s monologue towards the end of the movie to which every cast member applaud but I can’t. Had Barua not been overcome by this desire to also underline that Indians have forgotten Gandhian values, the movie would not have suffered.
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