Dev D

Bollywood is finally coming of age, they say. And I’ll have to agree with that. It’s finally time for showing more than just the current reality, the stark one, if I may say and playing with the viewers’ minds in ways unimaginable. The characters are well defined, their heads warped, their decisions even more so. And nothing is justified, nothing is shown as pitiable. Everything is our own choice, our own doing, and the psychedelic scenes bring our illusions to life like never before.

I left the hall feeling messed up in my head - full of frustration and awe at the same time. That was probably the desired effect, and it was appreciated. But the one thing I did not appreciate was the depiction of events in the movie which drew close parallels to actual scandals which have rocked the nation over the past few years. The depiction of an MMS scandal and a BMW hit and run case. It doesn’t take a genius to make the connections to the real life events. On the one hand, the director actually garners sympathy for the protagonists, showing their side of the events and the torturous aftermath, specially in the MMS scandal. But somewhere he seems to have forgotten that these are actual people living out there in the world somewhere today. Does that girl need the nation to remember the scandal all over again? Is that not torturous in itself? Or worse still, the suicide of the protagonist’s father, followed by her running away and turning to prostitution to sustain herself – was that the director’s take on the supposed mistake she had made? How could that be his point of view, when he supports the character with powerful dialogues such as ‘…and they called me the slut.”

A lot of my friends did not agree with this, for at the end of the day, a story is a story, and everyone has the freedom to express their opinions. All I know is, I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life being judged and paying for the so-called mistake I made once, a long time ago.