TUM BIN 2
THE ART
OF HAPPINESS
It is a mistake to
believe that the decisive moments of a life when its direction changes forever
must be marked by sentimental, loud, and shrill dramatics, manifested by
violent inner surges. This is a sentimental fairy tale invented by drunken journalists,
flashbulb happy filmmakers and readers of the tabloids. In truth, the dramatic
moments of a life-determining experience are often unbelievably low-key. It has
so little in common with the bang, the flash, or the volcanic eruption that, at
the moment it happens, the experience is often not even noticed. When it
unfolds its revolutionary effect, and ensures that a life is revealed in a brand
new light, with a brand new melody, it does that silently and in this wonderful
silence resides its special nobility.
It was two thousand and
thirteen. On a listless day, I watched Remember Me. The movie left me edgy in a
manner that I could not explain. It was as if something had been picked up and
moved places in my heart. In the days that followed, the feeling of loss,
restlessness, and the frailty of life devoured me, and I kept going back to the
movie, and discovering something new every time I watched it again. Then my
friend Mohit Suri ended up making Aashiqui 2. Mo’s staggering treatment of the
film struck me like lightening. It was a life changing experience. Even to this
day I have never recovered from the effect Mo’s movie had on me, and in the
strangest way possible, I don’t want to recover from it. Obviously by now you
would have reckoned that if anything has ever come close to shaking me up after
the first two, it has been Tum Bin 2. Motion pictures, like books, and people,
and life, have the ability to submerge into the subconscious and leave you
altered forever, and yet, it is an irony that everybody takes cinema to be only
an activity of casual amusement.
Any dialogue about what
the purpose of life is, or about what is the good life, or about what is the
ideal life, carries a rather muffled sound in these reckless and cynical times;
but, after all, such questions are
being dealt with, at least in minor issues, by the individual conscience every
day, and if a writer like Anubhav Sinha has the mettle to bring up this primeval
problem, and the wit to apply it to modern conditions, I cannot see that he is
beating the air. No amount of cynicism seems to save our individual conscience from
distressing struggles; and in these struggles, whatever our philosophy may be,
the value we place on happiness and the meaning we attach to happiness must
play a part.
Let me tell you here
that happiness differs from pleasure in this very thing, namely the idea of quality, the idea of something cerebral and
emotional, of something intellectual and when ‘divine’ is affixed to it, everything
then begins to take on a more sensual atmosphere. A man could be happy while he
was in the act of sacrificing his life, whereas, we should scruple about using the
word pleasure in this connection.
I must confess that it
is tricky to see how what we call happiness, and I think the word has come to
mean that particular glow of well-being that arises when something deep in us
is being satisfied and fulfilled, can take any place but the highest place in
our estimate of life’s highest good. That is the highest good that Tum Bin 2
sets out to achieve, and does an enormously refined job at it. Irrespective of
how wondrously well a sequel is crafted, people would still scratch their chin
and utter thoughtfully, “Umm, I think I liked the first one better.” It takes
some time for people to warm up to something similar but in an entirely new
skin. While some would embrace this new rendition of the old, some others would
vehemently oppose it, and this is where one is bound to face minor hiccups. Yet,
when the vision of the writer and director is clear-cut, then the same thing tends
to apply to that mysterious relation, between what is half-created by the mind,
and what is half-discovered in nature, which we call beauty. If artists and
poets and storytellers and their audiences didn’t find happiness in this
particular human activity, it would surely never have become the enormous urge
that it had become for Anubhav to make Tum Bin 2 with Neha, Aditya and Aashim.
For the purpose of transparency,
I would like to take you, the reader, through the film from the beginning in
the same manner in which it unfolds. Please be forewarned that this is not a
superfluous evaluation of what you have been accustomed to reading across
various mediums of the media until now. Media is a funny tool really. It tells
you what to think, and what not to think stemming from people who don’t know what
they are saying themselves. Therefore, as long as you read this summation of
mine, I would beg you to liberate your mind of any pre-conceived notions of
mental slavery and keep your thoughts as open as you can. A feat somewhat obscure
in these times I know, but you can do it if you want to journey with me on this.
So here is where you may please fold your sleeves, abstain from distractions,
and dip right into this, as I would like you to engage with me as much as I
have endeavoured to make this as engaging as I possibly can.
The film opens with
Amar (Aashim Gulati) and Taran (Neha Sharma) driving through the snow-filled picturesque
landscape bantering romantically. Lost in each other, even before they can see
their fruit of love ripened to fruition, life plunges them into a quagmire –
Amar meets with an accident, and after a search of nine days, without a trace
of a body, is presumed dead. The people who loved Amar try to come to terms
with what has happened, but the human soul is such that it carries about it its
own mysterious memories that, like night-winds fluttering the faded arras of an
ancestral chamber, throw into momentary relief dim motions of forgotten figures
whose beauty once transformed our life. Sufficient to say that the soul within
us is a microcosm, not a micro-polis, and is born for the exhilaration that
flows from a cosmic, not a dogmatic or economic life. There is a craving in us,
felt by men and women of every colour and every race that neither the passion
for communal improvement, nor the passion for communal applause can distract
from its organic unrest. What follows after is something you have to experience
yourself by watching the film. I must tell you that if you are anticipating
melodrama, then Tum Bin 2 is not a film for your tastes. There is no lovemaking,
bosom showing, scanty attires, vulgarism, or any traces of frivolity in its narrative.
In simple terms, Tum Bin 2 is reality personified in its cleanest and highest
entertaining form.
LOVED
1/ The conversation
between Papaji (Kanwaljit Singh) and Taran at home about grief makes you
realise that grief has that white-ant devastating ability to destroy one’s
entire life without one getting to know of it unless the walls crumble
altogether one fine day before one’s eyes.
The best way to take the
death of someone who was the reason of your own life, is to accept it and then
try to avoid all thought of it, though there is more to be said for that method
than for brooding on its overwhelming negations, but to think of it in some positive way, as possessing, equally
with life, some tremendous withheld secret is about the only manner in which
one can find release from its all-consuming devastation.
Must warn you though
that this way of thinking of it need not be very distinct (it obviously cannot
be where we are in such absolute ignorance) but it can be positive as mentioned
above, and it can be hopeful. We have an equal right, as far as the ‘truth’ of
this matter goes, to be hopeful as to be despairing, for our ignorance is
complete; but since there is really a half-chance that the mind’s attitude
counts for something – that lifelong concentration on the idea of surviving
death might be an element in our surviving it. This is where, despite the fact
that Taran concedes to Papaji making her understand that Amar is now gone, and in
accepting that they have to deal with their own lives, they could either brood
or learn to get a grip on life. As tough as it is for Taran to accept the
notion that he is no more, she holds onto some string of hope that Amar may not
be annihilated. The language of souls is something that no body other than the
two who share that cosmic connection can sense and feel. If that were not the
case she would not be dead certain of seeing him in people passing by. Well
some may argue that such a phenomenon is not rare, but something, somewhere
tells her that the mystic fusion of their entwined spirit and flesh is intact,
that the separation of the flesh from the spirit and vice versa has not taken
place. Weighing her possibilities, she chooses the wisest course: to live on,
since no one can deny that these issues, survival and annihilation, are equally
possible. She learns to combine them in some vague way, and formulates in her
mind an imaginative conception of his death, or even an imaginative image of his
death, that would allow for the feeling of annihilation, or of something annihilated, as well as for
the feeling of survival, of something
surviving.
2/ The dialogues are remarkably
real even though they are loaded with profound metaphors. Imaginably, it is for
this very reason that the critics are unable to differentiate their eminence
considering that they are rather accustomed to hearing jibber-jabber on the
screen, and deem anything else as abnormal. “Elementary, my dear Watson,” said
Holmes, “one’s level of sensibility can be gauged by not what one praises, but
by what one does not.”
4/ Music is at once the
most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts. It is the most abstract, the
most perfect, the most pure – and the most sensual. I listen with my body, and
it is my body that aches in response to the passion and the pathos embodied in
this music. The music by Ankit Tiwari is all of that and more. Tum Bin, Ishq
Mubarak, Dekh Lena, and the evergreen Teri Fariyad leave you yearning for many
more of such melodies. The magnificent camerawork by Ewan Mulligan takes to the
production design like iron does to magnet. The costume department shines like
a scintillating star.
3/ The fact that common
knowledge states, one, when we are incredibly happy, and two, when we are
terribly sad, is when we evoke those (subconsciously) who leave an unambiguous imprint
on our heart and mind. What we reflect upon when we are in that state of mind
is what our soul truly craves. I adored how Amar kissing Taran flashes in Taran’s
mind when her sister Gurupreet (Sonia Balani) keeps her fingers gently over her
shut eyelids in the car.
4/ That each one’s
understanding of love, and their definition of it is as distinctive as are our
fingerprints. Taran and Amar share what we would call genuine, idealistic love.
Shekhar’s (Aditya Seal) style of love is to take care of people in the smallest
possible way. His love is unconditional, devoid of expectations. Even when it
dawns upon him that he loves Taran, and she has grown fond of him, he is ready
to let her go because he understands that true love is not to be found in possessing
the person one loves at all costs. Similarly, Amar is aware that in time,
feelings can change. He is delicately attentive to Taran’s dispositions. He is aware
of the internal tussle she is going through, and yet he is not someone who is
willing to thrust his feelings on her, or use sentiment to manipulate her.
Instead, he provides her the free ground to decide and do as she pleases. These
two types of love, in their richest form was something that my friend Anubhav Sinha has
sculpted with the same thoughtfulness, as maybe Michelangelo would have approached
his marble.
ADITYA SEAL as SHEKHAR
The Perfect Gentleman!
Eyes. Nose. Mouth. Ears. Chin. Physique. Personality.
Talent. Flamboyance. Elegance. Suave. Strong. Versatile. Gallant. Some of the 'real-life' attributes one can notice in Aditya without having to think or look too hard,
and every bit of that gentlemanliness has been percolated into the character
that has been portrayed by him in the movie. He bakes a cake with the similar ease of making light
of a strenuous moment. He opens the car door for the lady, to smashing the
mirror when engulfed by the ache of hurt. From a twenty-seven year old software
wizard, to the charming fella who lives in a lovely place and likes it a ‘bit
messy’ in his own admission, gentility runs in his blood, something he states
his father had taught him rather young. He is such an exquisite reproduction of
gentlemanliness, something that was a common way of life, and something that
has been vanished to the vagaries of our bad-mannered times.
When you watch a
character like that, the nuances in his nature could certainly tinker the uncouth
behaviour of people at large, and prod one to live a life that is admirable in
one’s own eyes and noteworthy in the eyes of the bystander. Besides having
chosen Aditya to play the role of Shekhar that fits him like a glove, such a
story gives us an insight into how the writer thinks by looking at the way he
has approached his story. Three cheers to my friend Anubhav for the fantastic screenplay.
This is how I would sum
up Shekhar’s essence.
“It is the mission of each true knight...
His duty... nay, his privilege!
To dream the impossible dream,
To fight the unbeatable foe,
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go;
To right the unrightable wrong.
To love, pure and chaste, from afar,
To try, when your arms are too weary,
To reach the unreachable star!
This is my Quest to follow that star,
No matter how hopeless, no matter how far,
To fight for the right
Without question or pause,
To be willing to march into hell
For a heavenly cause!
And I know, if I’ll only be true
To this glorious Quest,
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm
When I’m laid to my rest.
And the world will be better for this,
That one man, scorned and covered with
scars,
Still strove, with his last ounce of
courage,
To reach the unreachable stars!”
AASHIM GULATI as AMAR
Aashim Gulati has a pair of the most incredibly
expressive eyes, and if there is anything he ought to take a policy on it must
be them. There is this unique combination of mischievous melancholy in him. Roles
choose us rather than we running after them, and therefore, it would be wrong
if we compared him to anyone else as I see some of them doing in the media. Let
me give you a little example. My brother Imran Abbas Naqvi was supposed to essay
the role of Rahul Jaykar that Adi ended up doing in Aashiqui 2. Immu had signed
Boss with Akshay Kumar’s company and was under a contract not to do anything
until the movie with Akki had released. Unfortunately, Boss did not see the
light of the day, and in the interim Immu lost the lead role that Ranveer Singh
played in Ram Leela too. Akshay was a friend, and my brother did not want to decline
from the contract. Moral: what’s written in your fate will come to you. These
decisions are preordained. Just like nobody can give it you, nobody can take it
away from you.
I am no one to stop anyone from voicing his or her
opinion, but someone who isn’t shallow will know that to compare anyone to
someone else is downright foolish. Aashim is Aashim. He is tender towards the
bashful. He is gentle towards the distant. He is merciful towards the absent. Unruffled.
Organised. Mighty effective. In a nutshell, he has his own individuality. His
very aura leaves you with such positivity; so what more do you want?
Given the time, and a befitting role that allows him the range to express his
prowess, Aashim can be what you want him to be. That is what actors are right? They
give you their best, provided you give them something to prove their best.
NEHA SHARMA as TARAN
“While men are able to reflect upon their lost
companions as remembrances apart from themselves; women, on the other hand, are
conscious that a portion of their being has gone with the departed withersoever
he has gone. Soul clings to soul; the living dust has a sympathy with the dust
of the grave.... A shadow walks ever by her side, and the touch of a chill hand
is on her bosom, yet life, and perchance its natural yearnings, may still be
warm within her, and inspire her with new hopes of happiness.”
~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Chippings With a Chisel,” 1837
Neha Sharma plays that role to the T. Her perfectly
symmetrical features add an unbeatable charisma to her overall appearance. She
looks stunning in a sari at the Gurdwara just as she looks sensual in knee-length
boots when she stops by Shekhar’s home to share the news of the chefs agreeing
to help her with her patisserie.
I overheard some young men the other day. And I quote
verbatim – Man, she is bloody hot. I would not use the terminology ‘hot’ as it
is commoditising a human being to nothing less than a piece of merchandise, but, yes, there is no doubt that she is unbelievably
and strikingly and vulnerably good-looking. What’s more? She weeps with such feeling
that it makes one clamp one’s fist with helplessness. More than anything, she
was introduced by Mohit in Crook, and because of that I have a great fondness for
her.
SUBTLETY
1/ When Amar is descending
the steps at the airport, and Shekhar sets his eyes on him for the first time,
it rouses in him, though faintly, a spring of happiness. In normal
circumstances many people would buckle under the sharp pressure, but Shekhar being
Shekhar, he absorbs the affliction, to stay strong for the people he needs to stay
strong for, despite the strapping of his heart. That motion of the heart bears
a remote resemblance to the analogy of a fish leaping out of the water, into
the air, and back again into the water. This ‘fish-like’ leap of primordial
desperation is a universal psychological experience. Were it not recognised as
such, I would say that the person in question is in some way sub-normal,
sub-vital, and sub-magnetic. If I may elaborate on this, this ‘out of the water
and back in to the water’ is an act of the soul that is the most comprehensive
act the soul can make, an act that includes not only an embrace of the mystery
of life, but an embrace of the mystery of death, considered as something positive,
given the situation. As crazy as it sounds I think that the fish swimming
in the water is like our soul in its practical absorption in the diurnal
routine of its existence; but when it leaps into the air, to fall back again
with that familiar sound which is one of the most poetical sounds in nature, it
leaves for the moment its proper element and invades a super-element, an
element which might be compared with the other-dimensional
mystery which surrounds our mortal existence. The leaping fish does in fact
(for the air into which it leaps would be its death if it could not sink back
into water) represent the soul embracing both life and death in an instant of
predetermined intensity.
2/ When Taran recounts
to Amar what happened at the resort and tells him that as much as she loves
him, she now has someone else in her life, Amar finds his soul stirred. It is
almost in a state of war, war down to the roots of things, but he gathers
himself by figuring that he could either fight this abysmal battle by the act
of aloofness, or by the act of intense integration. He understands the truth
that we each submit far too much and far too humbly to the pressure of the
daily miseries implied in our ordinary life. When not ourselves in extreme
pain, when not sharing by the sympathy of our nerves the extreme pain of
another, who is there shall dare to put limits to what the human mind,
fortified by a practised will, can achieve in the evoking of happiness and
peace?
He knows that he is
standing between two extremes. On the one hand he can pursue what is popularly
called ‘pleasure,’ grossly, heedlessly, selfishly, at the expense of all finer
considerations. On the other hand he can let his personal life go and give
himself up to some absorbing cause,
which becomes more to him than his soul or body. And he chooses the latter.
These things make you
realise how life changes. How what we once held most dear to us can change when
there is little hope of it coming back to us, and when it does, which happens
quite by chance, how difficult it is to deal with such a tumultuous
predicament. It makes us realise how important each one is in one’s life, and
to compare one to another is impossible, for each individual is an infinite universe
in his or her eyes, and one cannot compare one infinity with another.
3/ When Amar is thought to be no more, Kanwaljit has a
mildly hunched back in certain scenes. Something rather identifiable with those
weighed down by bereavement, but once he finds solace in Shekhar, he straightens
up a little, and once Amar reappears, his body returns to being upright. Much
as we may think we have a control over life, our mannerisms speak their own
language.
STRENGTH
- Are to be found in its
relationships. The warmth shared between the sisters. The unshakable bond shared
between Shekhar and Papaji. The love and respect Taran holds for Papaji.
- Little things like Amar sensing how uncomfortable Taran
is while he is playing chess with Shekhar and offering her the cushion. He
stopping by to tell Shekhar that given some time, he would love him too like
everyone else in the family loves him. Where does one see that vastness in a
character today? Everyone is busy wanting to amass everything that comes their
way, possessions and people. To build is alien to current human nature. That
shade of Amar’s character where he understands that love is not merely looking
at the bigger picture but that it is the little things that make the
biggest differences in one’s life is something I was thoroughly impressed by. And
it all boils down to that now, doesn’t it?
- Columnists seem to be
condemning the movie by saying that it is preachy and confusing. I rather think
their assessment is correct, in order to know the brilliance of a diamond, one
has first to have an eye to spot it in its raw state, and considering that
these people who write aren’t quite knowledgeable, illiteracy quite reflects in
their evaluation. Bin 2 is not a mass-market movie. It is a thoroughly
reasonable and realist approach to life, and at what life throws at us. The absence of melodrama
is leaving people bewildered, but like Shekhar articulates, life is, in truth, a
summer vacation. I also read how those dialogues have become a point of discussion
with the ill-informed. Once again these hoity-toity press people fail to
understand that when they get back home from the fancy, free-food and booze
parties, and look at themselves in the mirror, sans embellishments, that is
their unfeigned life staring back at them, and the least they can do is not be
vindictive. For me what the conversation at the table imparts on us is a mighty
lesson on the entire meaning of existence. I found myself moved by the manner in which Aditya brings
immortality to those lines by the control he has over the tinges of his
intonation. The conversation has existentialist undertones, with traces of
phenomenology, and clearly, the critics not being familiar with those thought
processes too, are not able to differentiate between the distinctions.
- Angst is dealt with such dignity in the movie. The
actors do not drop to the ground, pick up the closest potted plant available
and thump it on their chests to display their heartache like it so happened in a recent multi-starrer made by a friend. The same critics who
claim that the screenplay of Tum Bin 2 is ineffective, have praised that
retardedness (pot-thumping on the chest) to the sky. It is nothing but clear star-power prejudice at its
dirtiest.
- The Indian Pakistani slant
is excellent. I wish I could elaborate on it, but if I do, it would rob the
suspense away, so I would rather leave it for you to watch and decide how you
feel about it.
- Since the last few
decades we have each given so much emphasis to individuality that we have forgotten
what it means to be inclusive. Our nuclear lives have left us so desensitised
that our very core escapes us. Adrift in our own worlds, we are actively chasing
money, trying hard to impress people and boost careers that we have forgotten
to care and be attentive to the needs of those around us. Tum Bin 2 educates
you to be sensitive to your life, environment and the people in it. Numerous
scenes have no dialogues at all, and yet they convey what they have to convey
via visual clues, indicating how observant the characters are, and isn’t this
the crux of life? Being sensitive to your surrounding. It is a movie that is
nothing short of a testament to that pristine virtue of mankind: care and love.
ADVICE TO A
LITERARY CRITICS
“My advice to a budding literary critic would be as
follows. Learn to distinguish banality. Remember that mediocrity thrives on
“ideas.” Beware of the modish message. Ask yourself if the symbol you have
detected is not your own footprint. Ignore allegories. By all means place the
“how” above the “what” but do not let it be confused with the “so what.” Rely
on the sudden erection of your small dorsal hairs. Do not drag in Freud at this
point. All the rest depends on personal talent.”
- STRONG
OPINIONS by Vladimir Nabokov
FINALLY
Tum Bin 2 tells us in coruscating tones that if one has the energy enough not to fling oneself into the
aloofness of the drudgery of life, then we must influence our souls to leap up
from the depths of one’s being. We must influence it to make light of the
material pressure around us, a typical specimen of the hardness and prickliness
and scaliness and dreariness of the devilish side of life. It tells us that we
must lump all the evils together, the physical ones, the mental ones, and the
whole damned ‘outfit.’ And that we must then pull ourselves together, wrestle with the accumulated mass selecting out
of it one, or two, of its more tolerable aspects upon which one can concentrate
without especial loathing; or, if there are no redeeming features in it at all,
we must concentrate on the chemical constituents of our ‘cul-de-sac,’ on the
elements of air and water and earth and fire, which in some form be present in
ridding us of dirty boards, darkened stones, misty windows, and a dripping
faucet.
The sturdy
characterisation of Aditya Seal, Aashim Gulati and Neha Sharma enlightens the watcher
that whatever you do, don’t ever begin to pity yourself, still less curse your
fate or the day of your birth. Avoid, like the devil, any comparison between
your luck and other people’s luck. It tells you to say to yourself time and
time again, “This is life and I am a child of life; and what I have to do is to
wrestle with this loathsome-lovely mother of mine as long as I’ve got any
breath in my body and any consciousness in my mind.”
PS: I cannot say whether it was the abrupt announcement of
demonetisation that affected our countrymen that desisted them from watching
this movie, or if it was some other lucrative employments that kept them
occupied, but whatever the reasons, it upsets me that a brilliant motion
picture like Tum Bin 2 has not been watched by many. If not for anything, it is
an intelligent and entertaining movie, and it would have left many with re-examining
their life and looking at it with new eyes and new light, if they had the skill
to know what they were looking for in it. What hurts further is that people in
the metros kept away from the theatres too, enmeshed perchance in sorting their
financial muddle maybe.
Anubhav, Aditya,
Aashim, Neha, Kanwaljit, Meher, Ishwak, Jaspreet and the entire team, I
sincerely tip my hat and take a bow for your effort. Big hugs to ALL of you,
and LOVE to all of you!
