Walls of Empty Dead Silence

How much money do we need to lead a life?

Such a pertinent question haunted me after I saw Dombivali Fast. One of the most prolific film-makers I had the chance to meet Anurag Kashyap always feels after watching such films “Why didn’t I think of this” and I couldn’t help but agree with him. A film that every one dreams of but never has to screenplay to write is a film called Dombivali Fast.

Wake up early morning to have tea, go to water tanker to fetch water, have bath, get ready and in the mean time your wife cooks lunch for you which you carry to your work place, your children are getting up and ready in their sleepy state. Your son gets up late and lazy because he spent a good amount of night watching television, your daughter who is yet to attend the school is the cynosure of your eyes and hence gets a peck on her cheeks before you leave. You rush to the railway station, wait for your bogey to come, you push yourself in and get the “Fourth” seat on the Dombivali Fast local which goes to Church Gate. You spend a good 90 minutes in the train, reading newspaper, watching other people, trying to avoid the sweat and stench from the gutters. The DNA of your mind has been exposed to so many reasons in your life that it has mutated to the state of “Adjustment”. You loose the angst, you loose the power to react, you loose the power to reason, and you loose the power to ask for your rights, you just loose yourself totally.

Mumbai, apparently, does this to a lot of people. Travelers in the local trains develop a strange apathy towards life and anyone who commits suicide by trying to embrace the running train is treated with so much of disgust and disrespect that even after death, he realizes that not only his life received flake for existing, but his death…well less said is better.

You wake up to walls of empty dead silence. Your getting ready always meets the walls of empty dead silence. How much money do you require to lead a life, a cop asks his wife and he meets an empty dead silence. While watching Sandeep Kulkarni, the lead actor, doing a Greek tragedy soliloquy on the streets of Mumbai, near Flora fountain, and it still meets with an empty deal silence. How do your survive these walls of empty dead silence which keep closing on you, slowly killing the echoes of your voice, and strangulating them, leaving you with the corpse of your own voices. One man rises to the occasion and wants to make the deaf people in the city hear his voices against injustice, corruption, and all the wrong doings of the his life. The revolver with no bullet is aimed at the cop and in turn the cop shoots you right below your pocket and the blood oozes from your chest, and all you can think of is moving yourself to the window seat one last time before you die…and watch the world go by, this time closer than your regular fourth seat.

Playing the role of the wife of the protagonist Shilpa Tulaskar was outstanding. Her husband throws himself in to the fire of self-righteousness and wants to change the society. She is ashamed of the comment, the insult she hurled at him post which, her husband becomes a law himself. He thrashes cold drink shops for over charging, breaks a wrongly parked bike, stabs a leader, burns shanties selling drugs and threatens to shoot the doctor at a point blank range when he refuses to admit patients. After achieving all this and more in two days, he calls his wife to tell her that he is coming back and her inability to even speak a yes or a no, her open jaw, her running eyes, her choked voice…was a piece of brilliance.

Dombivali fast is no cinematic excellence nor it is in the league of something extra-ordinary but it surely is a film that establishes Nishikant Kamat as a master of simplistic story telling. It impressed me the way his Hindi debut Mumbai Meri Jaan did. It is a simple story, it has simple actors, it has simple direction and it has simple scenes and it has the simplistic question – How much money do you require to lead a life?

Marathi Films have always come up with surprises that Hindi films usually fail to throw. Though Marathi films are known for its farcical comedies and idiotic movies, they have always been rooted in their approach. The lead actor usually works with LIC, a bank or is a college professor. They don’t live in mansions; they all have houses in distant suburbs of Mumbai which usually are 1 BHK apartments in chawl or buildings with common toilet sharing. They don’t wear chiffon sarees of never-ending palloos but they have simple cotton gowns which shrink after two washes and you can see the petticoat peeking out at the feet. They don’t go to straight-out-of Riverdale colleges; they are the product of Marathi medium Municipal schools. They don’t study fancy subjects like French and German, it always Math and Science. They are middle-class. They are what we call India. Their DNA is like that. Their DNA undergoes mutation from the day they are born and that DNA keeps them alive in all situations, all circumstance, and all seasons.

That one Marathi man who revolted against the system also gets the teaching of his life from an old fragile Marathi man. You may get immediate solutions to your problem with this approach but you will never find a permanent solution. Instilling fear is not the key to find a solution.

My friend Karthik tells me that it’s a much toned down version of Falling Down where Michael Douglas plays the protagonist and Dombivali Fast is layered with Indian approach. Karthik has always raised this point that if you are getting inspired from another work of art, give due credit to it. That’s his DNA, that’s his cynicism, that’s his way of approach. Here is to the small little impact that you hope to make…here’s to www.itwofs.com.