I Am

THE GREY IN LIFE !

While we were all too busy, enjoying the four letter words of Delhi Belly and admiring the return of the angry old ( oops........young)man in Budha Hoga Tera Baap,a lovely art movie from parallel cinema, I Am came and went, unsung, unheard and may be unseen ,like so many other good art films. Like Seven Feathers, I Am too is a collection of four independent stories where the director has touched four burning socio-legal issues which really don’t have a right or wrong answer and are far beyond the Black and White shades of life, but their cause, effects, implications and solutions ,all are grey. The movie has beautifully touched the various aspects of four very pertinent contemporary issues ,Single mother, Jammu and Kashmir issue, Paedophilia and homosexuality.

The first story is of a young Bengali couple, where the wife, played superbly by Nandita Das, is very keen for a child while the husband keeps avoiding the issue till one day the wife discovers that he not only has an extra marital affair but was also going to have a baby out of bedlock. She walks out of the marriage and decides to have a baby ,out of artificial insemination and be a single mother. But she is keen to meet the donor. In medical practice it is ethically not permitted to disclose the identity of the sperm donor but she forces the doctor, as she rightfully felt ,that she should meet the biological father of her child. She even extends the offer to the boy, a medical student who is a regular sperm donor, to feel free later to come and meet the child. Momentarily she reconsiders her decision of being a single mother, but decides to go ahead but she drops the address and number of the donor, so that she may not be able to contact him in future.

The second story is of a Kashmiri pandit girl, played by Juhi Chawla who has been forced to leave her home along with her family and settle in Delhi. After her father’s death and the death of her uncle in Srinagar ,by terrorists, she is going back to sell her ancestral property to an old muslim family, who have been the caretakers. Trying to forget her past, she insists on talking in English or hindi and refusing even to understand Kashmiri .She meets the daughter of the muslim family ,played by Manisha Koirala who is her childhood close friend. Their son ,who is a reformed terrorist, is also there, leading a life of a paralytic and still under close vigil of the security forces. She meets their old grocery shopkeeper, to buy dry-fruits and while comfortably talking to him, suddenly realizes that his son had killed her uncle. She visits her old house with her friend, and walks down memory lane alone, her childhood, the attacks and then the escape in the middle of the night. She is stunned to see the restrictions and loss of privacy of the locals in Srinagar and ends with an emotional heated argument with her friend on the their decisions and those of the two families in life, in the prevailing circumstances.

The third story is of a gay Film director of Bollywood who is accused by his so called girlfriends for using his position to seduce the struggling boys on the casting couch He opens up to one of the girls and tells his story where he was regularly sexually abused from childhood by his step father and how he soon learnt to emotionally(or sexually) blackmail the paedophile, to fulfil all his desires and soon started liking the whole thing. His plight is touchingly summed in one line, when he says, I was a slut at thirteen ! He grows to become a gay and the day he felt he could be on his own he left home and came to Mumbai. He never went home again till he got frantic messages from his mother that the step father wanted to meet him before dying. He reaches after his death and tells the truth to his mother leaving her inconsolable, even though she refused to accept it as truth. I personally feel that if he had kept quiet all these years, he should have kept quiet now too, but probably he felt that his mother knew it all the time and was behaving blind. He was so hurt and considered the mother equally to be blamed, hence he did this, so that she too could feel the pain in the last years of her life.

The fourth is the story of homosexuals in metros .A well placed highly qualified gay, played by Rahul Bose, visits his old haunts and is seduced by a youngster. They go for a ride from the pick up joint, after dinner, and since they didn’t have a place to go they decide to park the car in a shady area and make it in the car. The director has been bold enough not only to depict gay sex vividly but added a hot long smooch too. A Policeman catches them and treats them as the hijras and gays are treated by them in the beaches n streets at night. The policeman not only abuses, beats and threatens them, he extracts all their belongings and money(almost all coming from Rahul Bose) and demands for more cash to hush up the issue. While the boy goes to withdraw money from Rahul’s ATM ,the policeman forces Rahul to oblige him with sexual favours. The boy tries to help Rahul, to prevent his status and agrees to surrender, while Rahul is let free. Quite sometime later, Rahul sees that boy again, seducing a man, and he confronts him ,telling him how bad he had done cheating him that night. On the earlier fateful night, Rahul, after being let free ,didn’t go home, but used his contacts to get a good lawyer and went to the police station to get that boy released, to find ,to his utter dismay that both the boy and the policeman were missing and then it dawns to him that they were in connivance. Rahul admonishes the boy for what he is doing, with any doubtful impact.

In a short duration, the movie has dealt with four major issues ,all of which have a great social and legal consequences but above all play a major role in the development of a person’s psyche. The storyline is strong and the screenplay realistic. The director has artfully used hinglish and the authentic language and dialect, including Bengali ,Marathi and Kashmiri and the dialogues are impactful. There is liberal use of four letter words, especially in the last story which is replete with hindi and Marathi abuses and vulgar language. The background music is soothing and the two songs have very meaningful lyrics. Not only the seasoned actors like Juhi Chawla ,Manisha Koirala, Nandita Das, Rahul Bose and Suri, did wonderful acting ,but even the other actors in minor roles did justice. The flow of the movie was spontaneous and deplete of any monotony and though it had four entirely different stories, they were beautifully merged with no abruptness at any moment. The editing was good and direction, flawless.

Besides subtly touching the increasing prevalence of extra marital affairs and infidelity, the first story highlights the trend of single mothers. In these times of woman lib and empowerment will men be redundant and unwanted soon? Shouldn’t a lady have the right to meet the person who is the donor for her insemination?? This may have an emotional connotation but has great legal implications. What if the gynaecologist does a poor job in matching the physical characteristics of the donor??? Isn’t it advisable never to be able to contact the donor and vice versa, to avoid any chances of attachments ????

The second story has nothing to do with the political aspect of the over two decades old J&K issue. It touches it emotionally. Who is to be blamed for keeping the issue alive at the grass root level ? who has suffered more, the Pundits or the Muslims??Who is better off, those who stayed back or whose who fled???Was it the correct decision to leave your home and business back and become refugees in a new city???? Shouldn’t a reformed terrorist and his family be left alone????? What is being done for the rehabilitation of those who fled and for the terrorists or those who lost their family members ?????? What is being done or rather why something is not being done to bring normalcy to the lives of those who are living in J&K??????

The issues raised and highlighted in the third story are the most important. Isn’t sexual child abuse usually by family members? How to protect children from paedophiles?? Can no one in and around the house be above suspicion other than biological parents(though at times fathers have been culprits)??? How to choose the right man for a second marriage to safeguard kids and property???? When and whom should a child reach out for help and what should he or she should do to prove the truth????? How can they be helped, specially counselling?????? How to prevent the child from developing emotional instability and altered sexuality ???????

The last story has once again expressed the plight of the gay community and their fears and dangers and how they are exploited by society, guardians of law and even by gays themselves. Are the gays to be blamed for what they are? Can they be rehabilitated, or rather do they need it?? Can making laws help them ??? Where should they find their partners ???? Can their sexual urge be curbed by treatment or counselling ?????
Should gays be so indiscriminate in choosing partner, time and place for sex?????? Is it justified to exploit and blackmail them ??????? what can be done to encourage them from coming out from their closet and to provide them social acceptance, which may solve most of the issues ????????

I Am is a superb movie which highlights the helplessness of individuals and society in various circumstances where one cannot really decide how to act or react and weather to accept the decisions of destiny or to fight them. The movie has depicted life as it is and its strongest point was the fact that it was non judgemental, it presented the stories in a matter of fact manner, expressing the inability to judge the characters for right or wrong ,as it is the case in life ,where things are often neither white nor black, but just the various hues of grey !As the very name implies, the bottom-line of the movie is that everyone should accept him or herself as they are and carry on with life !!

Dr Sanjay Kapoor Delhi