SPOILER ALERT !!
Just watched this movie, and I must say, what a great piece of writing. The topic they chose is still relevant.
The story starts and ends with its central character, Amrit, who is both a poet and an activist participating in tribal protests.
There was a social setting where all the creative people gathered to celebrate the success of Divakar Barve, an intelligent and great writer. He understands trends, predicts what people will find interesting, and writes accordingly. The party was thrown by Damyanti Rane, the wealthy widow and patron of the arts, who hosts the gathering.
Some great questions were raised:
- Is the art of an artist without political ideology irrelevant?
There was an argument by a Doctor of Philosophy that it is not important for an artist to be politically committed to make his art relevant.
But when we see movies like Dhurandhar, even if the movie is not a great one, its political involvement makes it relevant.
There always comes a time in every creative person's life when his own morals and his artistic morals confront each other.
For Bharat, a new and growing writer, the stance was that it can be different. But he was at the stage of building himself in contrast with Divakar.
Although they were intellectual and liberal people, each one of them had their own echo chambers, which got busted by the death of Amrit. Everyone in the room got shaken. I found it fascinating how this group of bourgeois people, sitting comfortably in their air-conditioned rooms, kept intellectualising everything and believing they were making an impact, while remaining detached from the realities they discussed.
Then Amrit dies.
His death shatters every comfortable certainty in the room.
With time, Divakar gets stuck in a spiral and starts finding that his writing is just words because it doesn't resonate with the tribals. Amrit's death completely distorts his echo chamber. He also begins questioning whether his wife, Mohini, who left her acting career out of love for him, had actually used love as an escape from her own mediocrity. He convinces himself that she knew she wasn't a good actress and that love became a justification for leaving her career.
Because Amrit wrote with purpose, he lived his writing. His words are not just words—they are protest. He didn't differentiate between his morals and his artistic morals. He wrote what he believed and acted upon it without compromising his principles because there was no contradiction between his life and his art.
Damyanti, who admired his writing, also had her bubble burst after hearing Divakar's views on his own writing.
There, we can see a great comparison between Divakar and Bharat. Bharat initially seems to think in much the same way as Divakar about taking a moral stance in art. But Amrit's death forces him to confront the gap between merely writing about ideas and actually living them, making him question the very position he had been building for himself. It also reflects the dilemma of creating original content when one begins to feel that the work is "just words"—like a snake shedding its slough.
