By Harsimran Kaur

Human lives, in the movie Dhurandhar, look like an incessant storm, repulsive without remorse, undesirable, carrying an unyielding obstinacy to slip under the dexterity, the gravity, the seismic grounding. Is it only the physical voluminosity that storms hinder? The pile of dust laden over the years; of such patina of the mind, how does it become distorted? The inner storm, the havoc to avenge, to mutilate with hard carriages of wood, and the sharp-edged sword sinking in the intestines lacerating the muscles as if it were a possessed human body, and such a spectacle is of much presentiment of eroded moral fabric.

If human lives run on impulses, such impulsions can be misleading if the fraction of mind disregards the wisdom of perceptivity; of other religion, of other culture, and such an epoch of fundamental hubris is a grinding complexity that one must condemn.

Dhurandhar is a glimpse to a schizophrenic mind that is unhealed. We too are not healed, isn’t it? The revenge spills at the very moment of doubt and disconsolation, and we are ready to enact such a revenge through words miscreant enough to appetize the starving wrath on the enemy in disguise, and this enemy could be the neighbour or the protuberant relatives but such a squall is within; this infinite storm of unsatiety, and such unsatiety is a lamprey latching to the core; this unsatiety penetrating through abandonment, and if the ‘self’ acts forbidden, then why such life is created and if it has, is it a piteous call to suffer, and if sufferings are inevitable, why are we locked into layers of repetition, which creates more anger, more revenge? Healing is thus transcendental! 

The zealous comrades, the righteous pretentions, the good & the evil, the tantalizing heroics forms a perfect synchronicity in the movie. But there is something unusual of such a mind that so conveniently lashes calumnies, and the cataclysm of such a mind; is it a proof that man is a pungent cannibal stinking in cesspool, a breathing corporeal, unhealed, restoring his adamancy, his ontological oeuvre into the penumbra of the ‘other’?

The decapitating head grotesquely becomes a football, the street of Lyari a playground. The spectators are a bunch of emaciated, bony onlookers who have no clue of where the goal would strike. I am sure the game of football would have never felt so uninspiring and intimidating but the human peril is such that the disturbing obsessions are often passed by the compulsions to hit harder.

I would call such a behaviour arising from complexity of human emotions. The bete noire becomes a loyal feed, and we all know such loyalty is amputated, and in such a process is it not possible to lose oneself? Despondency takes over from the past, the ripened tear lies listless in disagreement because such a fragile projection of ‘self’ is called ‘aroused sympathy, and courtesy the mayhem around, the tear cannot be an accomplice… Weapons take over and thus weapons become the autotelic language to show disgust, and in such depredations the superfluity of such weapons brings out the darkness, a weary blankness of the mind in servitude of the demons; to gladly acquiesce to it. Do we call this the human dispensation to be alive and kicking?

What keeps such darkness illuminating? A lighter? That’s easy and affordable. Well, that’s not the case in the movie. It’s the inner turbulence that invites the darkness often. The photographs are incinerated to remove a blockage when the same people in the photo have become the reason for ascension. Emotions are complicated, aren’t they? You leave a mother behind, wailing and crying; she is seen with a broom in the end. It made me think, is life lived through the unseen; what that we don’t see existed? Didn’t she ever thought that her son would one day walk through the gate; his abduction might have been a propaganda or a blatant lie? Such thoughts, such imperceptible awakening do cross in collision with reality but ‘real’ is not illusionary and therefore every end is destined.

The mother, if we now talk about reality, of how many years of dust she must have gathered around the gate; now her son comes from a moribund dullness and what he sees is her spirits gathered, not wrecked as they were when he left, and in this slight apprehension to not make her lose what she has gathered over the decade; is to now let it prevail. In such mysterious refinement, he wishes to go back to his noble truth.

Emotions thus become a perilous parchment of an indecisive mind.

Names change, religions change; it must have been awful but if sacrifices demand such transition, what are we losing? A permanency in life, and I know nothing is permanent but is change mandatory? And, if it does become, to get ready for it, with intention or not, does it matter to be a human with a conscious?

Tyrannical rulers are impervious; they give birth to their own moral proclivity, and no room is left for contemplation of the obvious as such analysis is blasphemous, and thus the mind, in a catastrophe complacency, chortles, and gradually cultivates a reason to inflict more.

Is tyranny always born out of dystopian or the impure, where such impurity is not related to body odour but the antithesis of moral obligation, but what if the tyranny of the despotic is pure, like the terrorist and the extremist who in their purified hegemony strike the iconoclast as if they were a wounded alchemist in search of their aseity? An obscenity, a contumely to androcentric and radicalism follows and then the memento mori.

Will there be an end to such a hostility driven by abstract expressionism?

‘An enemy will always be an enemy’; there are enough rabble rousers to scream such an apothegm, and people sincerely believe. The mind thus ostentatiously guards such a proclivity to incriminate the enemy, and this enemy is a pillar of our disillusionment; night & day, we construct a theory of ambush or a rampage of its territory, and contemporaneously our mind is coerced to a blurred vindictiveness, and such a precocity of ‘harm’ has made human puppets controlled by strings of antagonism.

When the movie ended, a coarse thought swept,

“Human mind is a devil, a distorted simulacrum of immoral determinism. It requires healing around life’s monotony, and such distractions that swell it to be a malignant incarnate is a displaced melancholy”

India and Pakistan have worried much about their boundaries, their borders, the hoodlums, and if conspiracies have not been enough, and the territorial regimes, in chaos, demand reprehensibility then is life so ordinary that the mirror is almost opaque?