So I saw Kahaani. No, I am not going to talk about the kahaani of Kahaani. I’ll tell you what intrigued me.
For me, it was a simple, intelligent and interesting story with “twists” that we all like. Formulaic in some sense, but effective and entertaining, so never you mind!
What fascinated me was something different: 1) the idea of multiple identities and 2) the idea of “true prevarications”.
The idea of multiple identities – that’s as simple as it sounds. Everybody has a dual (at least) identity here. Like “Bhalo naam” and “daak naam”, to quote Rana and Vidya. But that is only a surface idea. Every character has a mask, may it be Rana, Khan, Vidya, Milan, Bhaskaran or you name it! All of them are connected but yet in discordance. That’s what leads us to the greater idea of disguise. What are we all doing? We are all disguising ourselves. I should confess that I am obsessed with the idea of disguise. People ask me, why you wear fake nose rings when you can have a real one (though the fake one looks real). I often say it’s because I don’t like the idea of piercing my nose for fulfilling that one wish, which is true. But it is also because of this obsession with disguise; the feeling that you could don a particular costume for so long and then shed it like a snake and move on with life. Friends often tell me that I change so fast; my likes, taste, behavior (speech-wise – sometimes very reserved and at times highly talkative …etc). But I like the idea of being there and being something for some time and then being something very different so that the people you interact with now will never understand the “you” of the past and the past would never understand the present. It’s like a thousand different lives in one. –Now that’s what’s happening in the movie too. You’re obsessed with the pain of losing your husband and child and you’re creating a New You (hereafter NY) to avenge the deaths. The NY is the embodiment of all that’s (thus-called) negative or hateful in you. The NY is clever and calculative. Somewhat like the psychopath who will know every movement of his/her enemy and would immediately make a move according to it; swift and vengeful. In a way the NY is “Monjolika”/ “Nagavalli”, in a brand new avatar for a different cause altogether (maybe not so different thematically). There’s a lot of fooling around going on; everybody’s being fooled at some point in the movie, except for Vidya –for a greater period (except for the Bob Biswas sequences). Even we are fooled. We believe Vidya’s innocence for a long time, Rana’s love, Khan’s patriotism and what not! Nothing is true, as we understand it. But then they all face the truth – we have been fooled; except for the audience, who laugh at all of them for being fooled for so long, and also praise Vidya’s brilliance. But they never bought the whole story the way we bought it and then, we never realized that we’ve been under a spell of prevarications. That’s my second point.
Nobody’s true to anybody in the movie, at any time. It’s a carnival of illusions and lies. But even in those lies, hide truth and thus destroying the whole concept of good old truth (divine, supreme – such are the associations we have with truth in our culture). The liar is not a “bad” person here and the one who says all truth is not essentially the best of people either – may it be Khan, Bob or any other character! And Rana, even in his false utterances, emanates the fragrance of love which towards the end takes the form of a kind of love a son would feel towards his mother. From a potential lover, Vidya becomes a potential idol for him. The Bundle of Lies –Vidya- becomes the representative of Goodness in the movie. The whole question of what is true and what is not has been questioned all through the movie. The entire movie was a psychological rallying of various ideas that form the basis of our day-to-day lives but it’s been so intricately woven in the pattern of an entertainer that we hardly get the time to sit back and evaluate it.
To sum it up, it was like watching a not-very-satirical satire of the society we’re living in –its fears, its preferences, its behaviorisms, and its attitude and so on. Vidya is the ideal- what we all should be; Rana is the good –we should all be like him: balanced and genuine; Khan –our reality.
Altogether, it’s a nice, simple movie. Nothing extraordinary but still a good watch! If you haven’t seen it, go find a seat for the next show, right now!!
Cheers! 🙂
©
nandinipradeep 