Friday, August 22, 2008

Gandhi or Just a Mental Dementia Case?

“Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara” seemed to me a movie which looks very intelligent, innovative and classy on surface, but fails to give the meaningful impact you expected.

The first half of the film is about Professor Uttam Chaudhary losing his mental health and his family suffering because of it. Professor imagines that he has accidentally killed Gandhi.

In the second half, we see him getting treated and ending up giving a small lecture on how everybody is killing Gandhi everyday by not following his ideals.

The story is nice. The movie has been beautifully made. The actors’ performances are impeccable. The director has kept the promise of making a “hatke” film.

But I wonder how significant Gandhi was in this film. If you ignore the last five minutes in which the professor gives a lecture in the courtroom, the movie has nothing to do with Gandhi and his ideals on a deeper level. It has more to with the trauma and frustrations of an old man who is suffering from dementia and the pains his family is going through.

Had the professor suffered because of some other reason than “accidentally killing Gandhi”, the movie would have been equally good.

As I understand, Gandhi was just a method to bring some interesting twist in the professor’s problem. Had he started assuming that he had killed a milkman, the movie wouldn’t have looked so intellectual.

Even the lecture by the professor, the only part actually relevant to Gandhi, was clichéd. We hear such pieces on every occasion of Independence Day and Republic Day when some speaker comes to preach about how India is nose-diving south.

I would treat this movie more as the story of a psychological illness case rather than taking a meaningful take on Gandhi.

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