What are you willing to make allowances for as an
audience? When you are picking a film to watch, you are actually deciding which
of your sensibilities must be squashed for the next few hours. The audience
must enter with a different mindset than what decides if a Bollywood film is a
hit or a miss and here the focus is on the intriguing idea that built it than the
set of events that make up the plot of this film based on Plutarch’s Theseus
paradox.
“If all the planks of a ship have been replaced, and
a new ship is made of those planks, does the identity of the ship remain the
same?”
A visually impaired photographer forms her photograph by
her power of perception. She seeks moments through sound than sight. But when
her sight is restored, even though having gained something so vital, she loses
her power of perception along the way.
Her photographs lose their essence and she finds herself trying to blindfold her
eyes. Yet she finally removes the fold only to drop her lens cover in a scene,
to lose control of her art that was dictated by her perception. Does she remain
the same person? The paradox poses as a question to the figure of the
person.
The protagonist of the second story is a monk who amid the
good natured banter of a slightly verbose plot files a petition
against to improve conditions for the animals used for chemical testing. The
monk confronts an ethical dilemma with a long held ideology when he is
diagnosed of liver cirrhosis, that requires him to take the same medicines
tested on animals to ease his suffering
and has to choose between his principles and death.
“Zindagi mein khushi chahiye aur shayad thodi si manavta” is
stockbroker Navin’s philosophy but his conscience is strangely awakened when he
hears about a poor man’s stolen kidney near about the same time that he had a
kidney transplant. He follows trail and discovers how intricate morality could
be. Navin
questions whether his actions have made any difference at all and is reassured
with “Itna hee milta hai”.
Taken together, these stories ask how much an individual’s
actions can affect the world, and spells it in an intimate, worm’s eye
storytelling.
What troubles me slightly is Maitreya (the monk) and a young
lawyer Maitreya works with on the animal
testing case being mouthpieces for the director’s own ideologies with the
lawyer being named Charvaka after the branch of Indian philosophy that
embraces philosophical skepticism.
And as Rajeev Masand aptly put it, “It
targets that organ of the body that Hindi cinema consistently overlooks, the
brain”
PS. In case you have not seen the trailer ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5xt0cKasDw )
While Gandhi's Tumbbad was not equally glorious, this quote from SOT is still favourite to me.
ReplyDeleteThe fungus enters an ant's body through its respiration. It invades it's brain and changes how it perceives smell, because ants do everything they do from their smell of pheromones, right? So this microscopic little fungal spore, then makes the ant climb up the stem of a plant and bite hard on a leaf, with an abnormal force. The fungus then kills the ant, and continues to grow, leaving the ant's exoskeleton intact. So, a small fungus drives an ant around as a vehicle, uses it as food and shelter and then as the ultimate monument to itself. And when the fungus is ready to reproduce, its fruiting bodies grow from the ant's head and rupture releasing the spores, letting the wind carry them to more unsuspecting food. There, our entire idea of free will down the bin.One single small fungus spore does that to an ant. You have trillions of bacteria in your body. How do you know where you end, and where your environment begins.