This is not a movie review and it's not even about this film. It's more of what this film reminded me of.
As much as I love physics and mathematics, this deep rooted love for history had always existed. Me and another guy in tenth grade shared this staunch devotion to history and that could be the reason that we had a great bond and inversely the reason my love and attachment for history grew. Now, he was better than me in history and I had to learn so much to match it and beat him there. Maybe if I wasn't taking people for granted and he wasn't exhausted of trying too hard, maybe we would be friends even today.
History has this way of letting you live in a unique fantasy that gives you a little freedom for imagination and fitting yourself in. It's a way to feel like you belong here. Now, historical fiction is the only thing better than history. The ancient warfare techniques just pumps up a few notches on strategic skills. The way you learn history and see men over time, a long period of time, the fact that history is repeating registers so deep. The pattern that is unbreakable over the entire history of humanity is the wrong decisions and cruelty he chooses.
History is filled with too much blood, cruelty, fear and Gore. Sometimes I think, since iam attracted to such stories there could be something wrong with me. When I sit and watch the gory war scenes of my favorite period films and fantasies sometimes scares my family. Having wanted to be a war pilot till I fell into a different path, I don't find it surprising. The cruelty, blood, fear and Gore seems to be repeating itself within humans and no man has learnt from it. We don't even learn from our own life, how will we learn from history?
The idea of living in an ancient Bengali household and the culture that looks patriarchal and unacceptable today, in those timeless mansions and the kind of clothes i struggle to wear, in a small part of my mind seems like an enthralling idea. What an incredible experience would it be to be a part of history?
My grandpa's constant dialogue to all of my cousins and me was 'make history'. This was his blessings, till he died. Thinking about this, I don't know if I can fight a war and make history, that's for sure. Each life as we live as a present now will be history one day. Being a reference point is in our hands.
Seeing the rich colours and culture of films like this, inspite of the lack of modernization and narrow minded thinking, sometimes I think I would like to live in it. Just for the experience. I must have read a hundred versions of Mahabharata and might write my own at this point. A few versions of Ramayana from the point of view of Sita and Urmila would give history a completion. So, completion to history comes when everyone's story is told. Till it's Ram's story alone, it doesn't have much to offer. But when it's Sita's story, there is a new dimension. Not because she was a woman, but because she was the strongest and yet the weakest in the story, the one most affected. History has a way of telling the story of the most victorious and successful, but history is written by the men who win the war. How is it history when it only tells the tale of the winner?
Bulbbul was quite a revelation in this love for old culture and colours, that keeps coming back to me. But the problem it poses stays repeating in history, the unnerving expiry of a woman and the little piece of pawn on chessboards. When Satya said "But you can sit in the house and write", that was the only dialogue in the entire movie that would stay and haunt. It could either be the huge looming house that reminded me of this long forgotten life at my hometown or it could be the cigarette that the characters share remind me of a friend or it could have been this haunting dialogue by Satya that shows that incredible daftness, limited emotional range of human beings that brought back the faded loss of an old friend where we shared the very core of history, culture, archeology and the feeling of being our own Indiana Jones and the way we imagined ourselves to be the archeologists of the universe and explorers of space (we were both equally obsessed with space, cosmos, aliens and astrophysics). So maybe it's not just the dreams of people to be writers and filmmakers, seems like the aspiring astrophysicists and archeologists like us exist but now, he is on his way to be a doctor and me a journalist. The history of killed dreams.
On a final note, let me take a moment to appreciate Dr. Sudip the 'awe' (sadly he still remains one of the characters I fall in love with, and nobody similar I have met yet). I just hope he was named something better than just Dr. Sudip. Better made films do exist, better stories, better characters. It's the present that matters.
Repeating history tells the misuse of power by men who lust for it and feed on it. The intoxication of power and the men seeking it has repeated over history. Nothing bus really learnt by men. If we had the ability to correct our own grave mistakes, we wouldn't be here as an inhumane race. (Dei the ones who celebrated that the extrajudicial killing of those four men in Hyderabad, ippo moonji enga poi vechuka poreenga)
At this point all these are jumbled messy ramblings that has no meaning and structure and I should fuck off.
I should have discovered Praveen Mohan earlier.
Comments