Category: 2023

Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prem Kahani

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

I knew I’d like the movie. Because I am an Alia fan. Because I love family dramas. Because I enjoy Karan Johar’s direction and vision. I loved Ae Dil Hai Mushkil. And I wasn’t surprised that I ended up loving this movie, too.

Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prem Kahani has all the masala and the twists for a Bollywood movie. And it feels like a hit without a single macho punch being pulled anywhere on screen. It also hit close to home for very personal reasons. There are simply too many similarities right now between my life and various episodes in the film. I think that’s important for a good movie. And that’s why I loved it – because I connected with it.

The story is simple. An intelligent, self-made, independent, educated woman falls in love with a rich, loud, narcissistic, lovable, carefree man. Families realise the disparity and the lovers decide to test themselves in each other’s spaces for a few months.

Spoiler alert.

In the midst of it all, you throw in a septuagenarian romance that actually brings the couple together in the first place and then links them further. Then there is the antagonist: a matriarch who governs with an iron hand (already done in Ram Leela with far greater flair) but this doesn’t include physical but emotional and mental violence. There is a house governed by ambition and a quest for material prosperity. The other house is governed by emancipation and a quest for intellectual betterment and acceptance.

The movie doesn’t just tackle the romance and the odds of the hero and heroine. But interlinked within the families, each character struggles to find a voice or realises that the voice they were using could be biased at best and cruel at worst, as well.

The film has both Pride and Prejudice. It’s a subtle encapsulation of how people look down upon people, how we form prejudices based on past experiences and why it is important to realise our own trauma and make peace with due apologies. Every person in the movie is flawed. And growth happens with the realisation of these flaws and seeking to better one’s self through mature, self-affirming decisions.

The only abrupt change that seemed jarring was the write-off they gave Dhanlakshmi, Jaya’s character. But in a way, it was for the best, because it was in keeping with her character that the change wasn’t radical or real, but implied off-screen.

Dharmendra and Jaya Bachchan are brilliantly cast in characters just made for them. Shabana Azmi steals the screen when she is on it, as the woman who experienced true love for a few days that lasted a lifetime. She battled abuse and raises a son who is different from the typical idea of what a man should be and do, in India. This is brave (uncannily) and well-handled by Karan. The scene where Alia’s father is ridiculed speaks to every boy who grows up being different, in a patriarchal society. To exemplify this, Ranveer’s Rocky wears an outfit that’s vomit green as he laughs with the crowd. I noticed it, Karan.

The monologue Rocky gives addressing the ridicule Rani’s father faced, after a Kathak performance, is worth an honourable mention. It speaks of the need to understand not just what is considered woke in the modern day world but also the dangers of cancel culture that circles around it. For those who say that never happens to men who are into classical dance, you truly either live in a different world or choose to ignore the problems that are very much around in this world.

Rani’s character excels in her confrontation with Rocky’s father. It reminded me of the confrontation Reena Roy has with Lalita Pawar, in Sau Din Saas Ke. But there, there is the confrontation between two women. That happens with Jaya Bachchan and Alia, too. But what is actually different is Rani, a woman, standing in all her glory, dressed in Red at a Durga Puja and confronting a patriarch. The scene resonates because she stands there with no trace of fear. It is a juxtaposition to the scene where Rocky laughs at her father for being who he is. She stands with the frustration of all liberal mentality that reaches a crescendo at that point. It teeters on violence. The dangers of that happening is almost as bad as the despotic power that Dhanlakshmi holds over her entire family. Almost. But not quite.

The costumes were extensions of the characters. Rani was mostly dressed in the most beautiful sarees, since Sridevi’s performance in English Vinglish. Red being her colour and the implication of red being the colour of true love and passion, given it being the colour of the most sensitive character, of Rocky’s grandfather, essayed by Dharmendra. It is perhaps the colour that flares out when poetry is ousted by industry. Rocky thus wears a riot of colours, because he has it all in him and Ranveer can carry off all of them because he knows he can. He tends to wear black and white, when he is with his family. Do notice that.

I don’t know if I am the only one who felt so, but Alia looked a tad uncomfortable in the love scenes with Ranveer. If she is in love with the man, there can’t be a discomfort in the intimacy. In some shots, she just seems to be pulling away rather than pulling in. For the character of Rani to fall in love with the character of Rocky, there can be no chance of a lack of physical chemistry. And by the interval, the love has to have cemented enough to be there in their eyes. Ranveer has it, Alia loses out here. The character of Jaya Bachchan too for all her superiority complex just allows her husband and his lover to meet up? For a woman who walks out of a Durga Aarti, how does she sit by in discomfort when her husband obviously is being intimate with another woman? I found this a bit jarring.

There are a multitude of old song covers. Mostly from a favourite film of mine, Hum Dono. And the songs set to the OST of the movie are not particularly engaging but they work for the tempo of the movie. My favourite is actually not the title song but Ve Kamleya. (Must throw in an aside here: the movie begins with a dance number, which I quite liked, but it’s not the song that is worth a mention – I grinned when I saw all the nepo-babies make cameo appearances in the song. Tongue-in-cheek there, Mr Johar.)

All in all, I end with my personal opinion that Karan Johar has created a wonderful movie. He has applied himself once again to creating a family drama for the modern world and he has succeeded. Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prem Kahani is exemplary for the fact that it speaks of breaking away from issues that do not truly matter and finds shaky ground in a world that is itself trying to find a place for each person’s uniqueness.

The Blood of the Covenant Is Thicker Than the Blood of the Womb

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

Yesterday, my partner showed me my mom’s WhatsApp status. She had put up the picture of my sister and her husband up there with the caption, “my daughter and son-in-law” with pink hearts as exclamations. The picture was a sweet one, where my sister was cuddled with her husband – and the emotion was a simple one my mom expressed. It was affection and pride. It was a charming manifestation of what straight people feel about love and family.

I felt a pang of remorse and a prickling rejection. The man I have spent 23 years with, Anand, never once featured with me on any one of my mother’s status updates. He has been with me since the year 2000. He has handled every family problem along the way. Furthermore, he has met the needs of all the elderly people in my family and done, many a time, what even my sister and I have failed to do for them. My aunt, Goodie, loved and appreciated him more than any other in this family – and he treated her like a mother. No surprise there.

But he is still gay. In love with me, another gay man. We have no true measure of our relationship except for the one we both share in private. Our love gets no label. It gets no name. I am fine with that. I am not fine when to respect and appreciate it, others must understand it in the structure of their world view. If there is no marriage, there is no justification for love between two people. If there is no following the codes of society, society chooses to nullify the relationship.

I am even fine with the rejection that I face and will face from society. I owe them no justification. I am not fine with the ones who say they love me and have been a part of my relationship and not been okay with its manifestation. I am not fine with the ones I love who have used this relationship when they needed to use it, and then discarded its worth when faced with the questions society could ask. I am not fine with it.

That being said, I want to talk directly to my LGBTQ+ brethren now. When I fell in love for the first time, I thought it would last forever. I was 20. I ideally believed that love would conquer all. But over the months that passed, I made my lover my first priority. I was strong in my belief that he loved me like I loved him. I won’t go into the complexities of love and how strange it can actually be. I will, however, write of how a gay man saw our relationship.

He said to me, casually, one evening, “Blood is always going to be thicker than water.”

It took me aback. Here, I was making him my first priority. For him, I would have left my family and journeyed with him to his country, if he so desired. But to him, I was never a first priority. I was never family. I was not connected by blood. To be absolutely crude, ejaculating inside him would never count. It would never result in a baby. A being that would contain both our different bloods. A manifestation of what comprised of family.

(I will not get into the fact that even wives going to their husband’s homes, are treated as the Other. The ones living on the periphery of the innermost circles of what is construed as blood relations. Spouses, by default, in the straight world, are family in the eyes of the law, but in the eyes of the true family, still very much outsiders. There is no shared history, except for the ones marriage begins to make. There are divorces. There are separations. There are no links, by blood, that cannot be easily severed. Even there. But I won’t talk in detail about the straight world. Because in the gay world, we do not even have the choice of legal representation. We do not have the right to marry, before god and the rest of the clans, and prove to the Law of the Land that family ties can be formed with the blessing of society.)

So, in the gay relationship, I come into, if I choose to override the fact that we are not linked by blood, my lover becomes my spouse because I feel and think it so. But – and this is a big but – if my own lover thinks blood is thicker than water, the relationship is doomed from the get-go. For who else do I count upon when society builds up its stacks against us? When those with common blood decide to call upon its worth, my lover has to decide that blood isn’t the final calling. Love is. Until then, I will only be the lover. Never a spouse. And most definitely, never family.

When my first love said. “Blood is thicker than water”, he quoted what he felt was true. Heinrich der Glîchezære’s wrote this in the poem “Reinhart Fuchs” which he composed in 1180. “I moreover hear it said,” he writes, “family blood isn’t demolished by water.” He was writing this to mean that even if your family lived over the ocean, separated by leagues of water, the bonds of blood would keep them bound together. You might expect this saying to have arisen at such a time when Germanic people were migrating north, leaving their family behind on continental Europe. My first love was from South Africa, and he had come to India to study. Here, it seemed quite apropos. And true to form, once he left India, despite making promises to return for me, he never did. He broke my heart and made me realise my love was not stronger than his blood bond.

As gay people, we are often ostracised for who we are. Our parents reject us. Our siblings spurn us. We are not given a modicum of respect for who we biologically are, many, many times. Most of the abuse we get starts from within the family. How, then, does blood become thicker than water? We must come to realise this, and the sooner we do, the sooner can emancipation truly begin. Because emancipation comes from thought – it comes first from within, then from without. We have ample examples from our most beloved and revered stories. They manifest from truth.

In the end, I would like to quote a proverb from the Bible.

“One who has unreliable friends soon comes to ruin,
but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.”
– Proverbs 18:24

This proverb was further used by Henry Clay Trumbull, to create a twist in the saying people quote to me. He writes, “the blood of the Covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.” This means that people who make a blood-bond or blood-pact become more bonded than brothers who shared a womb. “The saying means that chosen bonds are more significant than the bonds with family or ‘water of the womb’. More directly, it means that relationships you make yourself are far more important than the ones that you don’t choose.”

Over time, I have begun to realise this to be true for me, because I know this is what I believe in my heart. I do not preach to those who choose the family they were born into over the family that they choose for themselves. I merely state this: If I choose to make someone my family, I do so with the complete definition of love. I am not obliged to love them because they are bonded to me by blood. I choose to love them of my own Free Will. I manifest this bond by love. For me, this love lasts for a lifetime. Being bonded by blood is a happenstance. I know this because my father never loved me, we were just connected by blood. But the man I have been with for the past 23 years, has stood by me, and given me more love than my father ever did. We do not share a blood bond. We just share love.

In my head and heart, that is what truly matters.

Birthday

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

This Sunday, I turn 48 years old. There are people who look at me and ask me questions about my external appearance. Social media is about appearances – and yes, I got on here over a decade ago because I wanted validation. You see, growing up, I was filled with insecurities and self-esteem issues. They have survived in me – like a heart beat that is consistent. I am quite sure even when my heart falters, they will not.

But over the years, I have learnt some valuable things. I have learnt finding and giving forgiveness is necessary. Envy is a waste of time. It is necessary to have a good friend and confidante by your side. It is important to be honest as often and as much as you can. When you feel honesty is hurtful, you need to be honest at the appropriate time, or be forever silent. I have learnt that the best of us are flawed, the richest are insecure, the most beautiful are frightened.

Being a romantic at heart, I found that love can last forever, even if it is not reciprocated. Love solves a multitude of woes, and the loss of it brings on a multitude of woes. I have learnt that time is fleeting. Even though Scarlett O’Hara believed in tomorrow, it cannot be trusted. The time spent with the ones you love is limited, and you need to let them know that you love them.

One important thing about love is that it never lives up to your imagination. It is not what you expect it to be. Life and love are similar that way. They do not stick to the plan, or the expectation. So, the key word to any relationship, even the one you have with your own life, is Compromise. You adapt, and you evolve.

No matter how dark the night, or how tortured the mind, or how torn the heart, time is a great healer. It fills all wounds. Yes, the scars remain. But they must serve as a reminder – not a lesson – as to who you are, what you have and can and will overcome again, if need be.

Death and loss are a part of this life. The fear of losing the ones I love consumes me. Being an atheist, I realise that this is one existence and I need to make the most of it. I need to tie up all loose ends and hope that my life has brought happiness to a few people and animals. My own death does not scare me. I have accomplished all that I have sought to do. I do not leave behind regret, just love.

I have never desired much in life. I was satisfied with what I earned. Ambition is not in my DNA – at least the monetary kind that brings in status. I have goals of a different sort. They deal with interpersonal relationships. Allowing people to be a part of my life and making them happy and giving them love. Yes, I would like to be loved in return.

That brings me to the crux. As I grow older, I hope to reach that place where I do not expect to be loved. A point in life, when I will not need external validation. I will be sure of who and what I am and finally be absolutely comfortable in my own skin. It will be enough for me to just love and live. But I do not see that happening soon, at least. As it is, thinking about tomorrow is not good for peace of mind. So I shall just end with a quiet hope that life will be kind this year. And if it is not, I will find the fortitude to deal with what it has in store for me.