TIU talents of the month

Manmarziyaan review

Kashyap's frame reworks the 2000 Bollywood sensation Dhadkan (Akshay Kumar, Shilpa Shetty, and Sunil Shetty): there are striking parallels in the story line (the stubborn old lovers lingering on and an ennobling virtuous bridegroom silently attempting to squeeze in) yet Kashyap's treatment is positively eccentric.

As i was coming out of the theatre, I overheard: "Why are these people (indicating three main characters) so confused, why can't they decide what they want?" perhaps this is one of the predominant feelings that we are immediately confronted with throughout the movie, but it gradually and certainly dissolves into something else.

The movie manifests, if at all, how "un-decidability" constitutes love, how un-decidability and fickle-mindedness is what keeps love away from being a closed institution, how love accommodates independence (Ananya Dutta said: Rumi might be a fiercely independent girl, and yet she needs to be in a relationship to be independent, for she exercises independence in love, in taking decisions freely when she is implicated within the bond; this is perhaps why the movie ends with Rumi leaning towards the bridegroom rather than choosing to be out of relationship at least for a while).

Anurag Kashyap brackets the "instance" of love rather than presenting an enduring (and thus false) promise of love; love as impulse and spontaneity that lingers on; love that encompasses the fear of taking responsibility, love that is "certainty" only in/for the passing moment, love that is both infidelity and purity of the instance. lovers: not untrue with their running away from the compulsions of love, not untrue because Vicky is unsure of himself-in-marriage, not untrue because Rumi decides to marry someone else before she outgrows her love, not untrue because they refuse to grow up, not untrue because each one impulsively weighs their individual happiness against love.

Love in Kashyap is not taken for granted, not for a moment, not even at each other's arms.

-Rounak Bose (BMS, 2^nd Year)

Photographs by Sourav Mondal BCA 2nd Year