Piyush Roy
Early, last year had come a film called Highway, directed by Imtiaz Ali of the Jab We Met and Rockstar fame. It was 2014’s first critical success from Bollywood that also became a popular hit. Two characters, a girl and a man, from different strata of the society, who in normal circumstances would not have even noticed each other, are forced by unusual circumstances to share an uncommon journey of love and care on a road journey from the deserts of Rajasthan to the hills of Himachal.
A year later, on another Indian road, comes a Marathi film, Highway: Ek Selfie Aarpar, with 30 plus characters on short and long journeys waking up to new life possibilities at a midnight jam on the busy Mumbai-Pune expressway.
A driver, who has let himself be guided by the side mirrors of any vehicle’s window, would have come across a factual guideline stating – ‘object in the mirror are closer than they appear…’Highway: Ek Selfie Aarparthrough a collage of journey experiences attempts at exploring possibilities the above line could possibly lend itself to.
On a road with many drivers and passengers, unknown but not unaware of each other, can circumstances make independent co-travellers strike some common chord? Marathi cinema’s latest poster director Umesh Kulkarni, gives that opportunity to a motley group of characters, who within them are a microcosm of today’s India in most of its diversities – the rich and the poor, the urban and the rural, the privileged and the migrant. It seeks to explore in their resultant interactions born of lived journeys of courage and silence, blending and understanding, desire and fame, lies and love, togetherness and loneliness –possibilities for love and care to manifest.
Ali’s film had just one story, here there are 10. Some work, few seem tad convenient, but most leave a mark, while one or two even make you wish that they had continued longer. At the crux of the drama is an observation by a character on going about with anunequalrelationship, which raises some pertinent questions, ignored!
What exactly is a successful relationship? How many of those are courtesy equal efforts, or does one person end up putting a little more than the other? And if he or she does so, then why or how?
‘In-equal’ is the order of a world as diverse as the one we inhabit. Human relationships predictably aren’t too different either. Yet, we are always little indulgent towards our own or anything that we notionally accept as our own vis-à-vis the ‘other’. That ‘own’ can be one’s siblings, family, caste people, co-religionists, fellow state folk, countrymen… How broad we make that ambit of what we consider our own, is often in proportion to how many can be made happy.
The bedrock of India’s socio-religious consciousness, the Sanatan dharma, has been a utopian model of existence called ‘vasudhaiva-kutumbakam’, i.e. ‘the world is one family’. It’s a great idea, but how practicable is it, especially in the context of today’s self-driven world views?
Highway Ek Selfie Aarpar offers a simple change in perspective to make that idea workable. Its plea for accommodation is– “No matter how difficult people maybe, once you say they are ‘mine’, they become your ‘own’. All of them (likable or non-agreeable, dear ones or strangers, etc.), become your ‘own’ people.”
Easier said than done, but in essence it is the purpose of every religious doctrine or any humanist’s aspiration – compassion– from which is born empathy and genuine brotherhood. Like Ali’s Hindi film Highway, Kulkarni’s Ek Selfie Aarpar, too is a concept story, a movie with a strong, perceptible message that’s delivered with conviction. Its genre category maybe a ‘regional film’, but its aspirations go way beyond the national, to the global. It also speaks in multiple languages – Marathi, Tamil, Hindi, and English – akin to the contexts of its myriad characters.
In a fortnight where the national Hindi language cinema from Mumbai oscillated between the mega (Phantom) and the mayhem (Hero) to the mindless (Welcome Back), that a little film from its regional industry could come up with a big idea, may well be a pebble in a puddle, but in its very existence, the quest for balance isn’t abandoned in an unequal world.
