I will preface this by stating that typically I am unconvinced by any argument that encourages me to watch a particular Hindi movie, especially the modern ones. I feel they (modern Hindi movies) are best left to view and fall asleep to on a plane on one of those innumerable long journeys that I keep taking. The last hindi movie I remember watching in its entirety was Baby, an Akshay Kumar thriller, in March 2015, that my mom convinced me I should watch since the entire family was going for it.
So I was a bit surprised to see myself heeding a recommendation from a friend. Usually I end up either skimming through or not seeing the movies she recommends, not from any feeling or knowledge that her recommendations are not of value, but just from a sense of laziness or a lack of time where it becomes too much to actually devote such a long time to a hindi movie. Somehow this time, it played out differently and I have no idea why. Perhaps some psychic sense persuaded me to actually spend the time to watch it, and I would just like to take the time to thank that sense. It was "laughter and tears for me", she had promised but tears are almost impossible to come by for me, except for this unexplained and uncontrollable sobbing fit I had a couple of weeks ago in a moment of complete panic and desperation, for completely uncorrelated reasons.
In this case though with the movie, the tears never really came for me - the laughter did. But in lieu of tears I felt a massive sense of empathy, sadness, and joy all rolled into one for the protagonist. She was shown careening from one short lived and utterly predictable disaster to the next. In the latter stages of the movie, we find the hidden sadness in her that propels her to her short spells of joy. The deep feelings of complete abandonment that the protagonist went through as a child and her transformation at age 6 into something colder, yet still craving for love, touched a deep empathetic strain in me (although no tears!) that took me back a few years to a letter that someone had shared with me, and the twisted path of life for this person that followed the events described in that letter.
Apart from the protagonist, the movie also delved somewhat shallowly into the other main character, an individual the protagonist meets and then seeks out along the way, who in his own way mostly talks but also sometimes listens to heal the wounds of the protagonist and point her to a better path in life, leaving her to actually tread on this path and overcome her deep rooted anger and pain, which she does on her own.
The movie was good, worth watching, although it did have some puerile moments. But it also provided an apt lesson that in life we meet people who we are sometimes destined to part ways with, and our interactions leave us with memories that torment us when we are lonely - Yes, of course, I would end with an old hindi song!
jeevan ke safar mein rahi milte hai bichhar jaane ko
aur de jaati hai yaadein tanhai mein tarpane ko.
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