Yamuna hai ya Jamuna? Josef hai ya Yusuf? Jesus hai ya Isa? Moses hai ya Musa? Batao… Brahma hai ya Abraham naki Ibrahim? Hindu nadi hai ya Indus? Hind ya India?
What are we fighting for?
Tamasha, the most beautiful, yet an overtly underrated movie of recent times, is the truth of cinema. It is the truth derived from real life, and the real life which is just an extension of what we perceive. This movie can be a complete chapter in the curriculum of film studies.
Right from transitioning the past with the present, weaving stories across religions and histories, fairy-tale love stories versus real life challenges, wanderlust versus mundaneness—everything is so well depicted and portrayed. Balancing between distances and differences, and silently having each other’s back all through, Ved and Tara showed love is not always the quintessential ‘bed of roses’.
हीर लिए दिल में और हीर खोजे वीराने में …
Ved and Tara meet first in Corsica, and they have an extraordinary Mediterranean holiday, quite oblivion to each other’s reality. The trip ends abruptly, and they move on. Seemingly so.
Four years later, Ved, a psychotic, bipolar individual, who is not able to differentiate between stories and reality meets Tara again. All this while Tara was longing for Ved, but couldn’t muster her courage to face him. When she finally meets him she finds him to be a different person than whom she had met in Corsica. Ved seemed like a regular guy, boring and mechanical, stuck in the maze of an imaginary settled life.
He likes the fact that Tara has come searching for him and tries to take the relationship forward. She, on the other hand, is shocked and confused, to say the least. She realizes her imagination has gone haywire and shares her doubt with him. The most memorable scene is the shot in Hauz Khas Social where he insults her and brings her logical thinking down. He tells her how she shouldn’t be sympathizing only to look for the empathy that she has for him, only to get that love which he missed having in his childhood.
That scene is iconic not because it’s for the first time we have watched something like this on celluloid but because this is reality. This is reality in every form. It happens and how. I had the last chance to watch this film with the person who probably needed it the most. Lessons not learnt, still thank you, Imtiaz Ali for the brilliance that Tamasha is.
Moments to Stories 