ARE YOU THE CHILD OF DIFFICULT PARENTS? Asked
author Susan Forward, which got me thinking –
When
you were a child…
Did
your parents tell you that you were bad or worthless? / Did your parents use
physical pain to discipline you? / Did you have to take care of your parents
because of their problems? / Were you often frightened of your parents? / Did
your parents do anything to you that had to be kept secret?
Now
that you are an adult…
Do
your parents still treat you as if you were a child? / Do you have intense
emotional or physical reactions after spending time with your parents? / Do
your parents control you with threats or guilt? Do they manipulate you with
money? / Do you feel that no matter what you do, it’s never good enough for
your parents?
Most adult children of tough parents grow up feeling tremendous
confusion about what love means and how it’s supposed to feel. Their parents
did extremely unloving things to them in the name of love. They came to
understand love as something chaotic, dramatic, confusing, and often painful—something
they had to give up their own dreams and desires for. Obviously, that’s not
what love is all about. Loving behaviour doesn’t grind you down, keep you off
balance, or create feelings of self-hatred. Love doesn’t hurt, it feels good.
Loving behaviour nourishes your emotional well-being. When someone is being
loving to you, you feel accepted, cared for, valued, and respected. Genuine
love creates feelings of warmth, pleasure, safety, stability, and inner peace.
Unhealthy families discourage individual expression. Everyone
must conform to the thoughts and actions of the toxic parents. They promote
fusion, a blurring of personal boundaries, a welding together of family
members. On an unconscious level, it is hard for family members to know where one
ends and another begins. In their efforts to be close, they often suffocate one
another’s individuality.
Similarly, perfectionist parents seem to operate under the
illusion that if they can just get their children to be perfect, they will be a
perfect family. They put the burden of stability on the child to avoid facing
the fact that they, as parents, cannot provide it. The child fails and becomes
the scapegoat for family problems. Once again, the child is saddled with the
blame.
Yet the beauty of human life is adaptability and we all learn to
survive.
Asim Raza’s Ho Mann Jahaan in its premise deals with the
pressing problems that parents create for us in order to think that they are
doing us a favour. The saving grace being the friend, the girlfriend and the
cushion they provide us in order for us to find some solace that go a long way
to minimise the jolt of expectations and how some of us tend to find ourselves
buried under its weight.
The film starts with the visuals of Arhan (Sheheryar Munawar Siddiqui)
admiring Manizeh (Mahira Khan) while she is getting ready for what one
understands to be her pre-wedding function. The scenes are controlled and reflect
an almost dreamlike quality to them. Mahira is as tender as a marshmallow, yet firm as titanium, and this is
rather evident in her demeanour and her countenance as the scenes unfold.
I had invited some friends over to watch Ho Mann Jahaan with me.
As the movie progressed and we were engaged in knowing where it would take us, we
observed that a friend (who was otherwise a bright spark of humour) seemed abnormally
quiet. Pausing the film where Manizeh’s mother, an equally strong character is cautioning
her husband about duplicity and how he shouldn’t be a spoke in the wheel in
letting their daughter follow her dreams, we took a break to have sandwiches
and tea. “What’s the matter?” I asked. He hesitated a little and then said, “I’ve
had a thoroughly spineless father who complained buckets about the
high-handedness of my mother, but before her was tongue-tied, at times a
parrot, or a scampering mouse. As sexist as this may sound, if a man is not a
man, and he hasn’t the expertise to keep the flagrant impulses of his wife in
check, the equilibrium of a family is lost.” Our friend helped himself to a
square of sandwich. “Not that I had missed him standing up for me any time, I
am an adult, and I quite frankly don’t crave his support, but when I was
growing up and was being mentally manipulated and emotionally abused, he played
inert, and when not playing inert, was an echo of my mother. That’s when I
pondered why he was less a man and more a shadow.”
“I see,” I said as I watched how the rest of the friends quietly
exchanged glances.
“Thankfully, I survived an opinionated, powerful and verbally
violent mother who was groomed to be so ever since her childhood. She derived a
near sadistic pleasure in insulting and belittling us without any rhyme or
reason. She was calm when in company of her clique, and gloriously charmed when
one toed her line. A slight nod of disagreement, irrespective of how illogical
she was being, was enough to bring the roof down. She would leave the
atmosphere foul with her yelling, and her hostility in deed and thought would
leave one wondering how someone who was this wonderful could also be this wretched.”
We resumed watching the film and stopped where Manizeh rings
Nadir to tell him about being selected to play their music at the popular Coke
Studio. Nadir, who has seen himself out of a meeting congratulates her and
seeks her permission like a true gentleman asking if he could speak with her
once he has finished with his work. Stretching a little, we started nibbling on
our snacks and sipping tea. Our friend left his serviette folded on the table,
by his plate and said, “When I was younger I would find myself questioning
myself whether there was any iota of truth in what she was telling me about me,
but in time I figured that it was only control games that she played with us at
home. There were times when it got to me, but ninety-nine per cent of the times
I let it glide over my head, because I knew I was not a power-seeking freak
like her, or a simpleton like my (absent) father, and most importantly, I was
not insecure. Much as we may debate it, it is often insecurity that leads
people to manipulate their family, but some do it also because they have been
raised to be selfish. ‘I don’t care about any of you. I live for myself, and it
is my way or no other way!’ Is what I have heard drummed into my head since my
childhood. There was barely a time when I was made to feel included. My father
seldom missed an opportunity in letting me know how unwanted I was, and my
mother asked me to get out of the house at a drop of a hat. And if I stayed, I
stayed because I was answerable to my conscience, and in a way I was also
scared stiff that if I behaved badly with them, harm may come my way. So part
devotion to the fact that they were my parents, and part fear kept me with
them, and by some twist of luck, touch wood, stone, steel or mud, despite the
hammering, I turned out fine.”
“That’s good,” said nearly all of us in a chorus.
For the first time that evening, our friend smiled, “It helped
that I refused to allow their heartlessness affect me. And this I could achieve
merely because I believed in myself. Instead of running away from the truth, I
learnt, early on, to call a spade a spade, which annoyed them beyond
unimaginable wits, and more of a cause of friction because they could not take
my being a mirror of their uncouth behaviour, but I knew no other way than to
stand up and protect myself.”
At this point I was hoping so much that Asim, Sheheryar, Mahira,
Adeel and Sonya were around. To see that their movie had evoked in someone such
a reaction would leave not only the writer or filmmaker, but the entire cast
with an imperative feeling that something that they had done with such love is
turning out to be a vehicle to let someone come clean about what they might
have kept bottled within themselves for heaven knows how long. This is where I
felt that film, as a medium, is more often associated with glamour, and people
seem more enamoured by this glamour, but film has something far more
powerful than we give it credit for: it has the capacity to alter lives much
beyond our imagination, and this is in the most profound way shaping a bit of
history too, whilst mending lives by playing an indirect psychologist, because a writer must
be a psychologist, but a secret one, and the actors play out what the writer
writes, and as Sam Shepard aptly said - the best actors show you the flaws in the writing, but when the writing itself is as impermeable as it can be, then the combination of words and visuals make the final product something that will be remembered for eons to come.
As
we progressed one realised that at the outset Ho Mann Jahaan appeared a fun
film of three friends, but underneath the light-hearted veil was a theme
that orbited around dreams, about the test of friendship, and about learning to
know what to keep and what to let go even in the face of adversity. In times
that were cynical, one needed such a positive representation of emotions. Of
values and how even when faced with adversity we do not and should not give up
on the ones we love and who love us.
“By
sharing this distasteful part of my life,” said our friend, “I am not seeking
sympathy, and neither is this washing
dirty linen in public. I
am sharing this since there might be several out there who are unable to deal
with the damage and cruelty they are facing. I want them to understand that
nothing will change the individuals who are habituated to getting their way.
They will remain inflexible and haughty, but, yes, you can change things by
changing yourself. By accepting the truth that regardless of what anyone might
think, or judge you with, it is you who is going through the ordeal, and that
it is you who has to deal with it. People will be amused. They’ll have
opinions. Such chatter retains some flavour until something else that is far more entertaining comes along. My two cents of advice
– care less for people, care only for your own mental health. Look the storm in
the eye and tell it – Heck, I shall not let you bring me down. I’ll not let you
destroy me any more!”
He then took a sip of tea and chatted with the rest of them
while I thought to myself that the biggest plague to have infected
modern life is selfishness. And in this pursuit of wanting to amass whatever we
can, we normally bruise the very people we love the most. Nevertheless, the yarn
of purity that folk’s share with their children, and some friend’s share with
their friends is such a wonderful sentiment that has been masterfully knitted
into the story by Asim Raza, who has penned the lyrics for the songs Mann Ke
Jahan, Dil Kare, Dil Pagla as well. It is your friends who take your world
apart when they want to, and it these very friends who become your greatest
support system. Without them life would be lifeless.
“What happened after that?” I asked once I awoke from my
rumination.
Our friend smiled as he turned to the ceiling for a few seconds,
drew a deep breath and conveyed, “Keep in mind that the pastime of such insensitive
parents is to push you to such an extent that you react, and when you do, to
conveniently make it appear like it was entirely your fault to begin with, I
would say, do not give them that joy. Show such people their place, but
politely and gently. Remember too that you can only keep your calm, but up
until a point, so shout back if you have to shout back at times: you are not a
saint, but do not lose your manners and respect because someone else is
disrespectful of you. Do not permit them whatsoever to walk over you, and if
they try to do that, then exercise your faculties in order to defend yourself
in any which manner you find it befitting, as you, and nobody else is aware of
the temperaments of the people you are dealing with.”
We all knew we had felt that way sometime or the other in our
lives. And so had Arhan and Nadir and Manizeh. With the permission of our
friend we proceeded with the film and then came the scene where Manizeh’s
father stops by to gift her a car, and soon after that scene our friend let out
a knowing titter, “Wealth and
lineage blinds one to the subtleties of life,” he said, “such people are so
absorbed in their own self-importance that they end up wrecking the entire
generation for their pride and gratification. I agree that we each have our
reasons to become the way we become, but when you come from aristocratic
families, big-headedness is an inescapable way of life for majority of them.
However, as adults, we possess the choice of being kind, or being despicable
human beings, and if I prefer to remain a douche, then it is a conscious choice
I am making, and such unreasonable behaviour is unpardonable. The unfortunate
one’s who get caught between the devil and the deep sea, are people like me, Manizeh
and Nadir who are born in such families with history and grandeur, and yet
aren’t a chip of the same conceited block. Then again there isn’t much we can
say or do than to let people like these flourish in their comfort zones, though
the only thing that we can do is keep away from them for the preservation of
our own sanity.” Our friend stopped, tossed a square of dark chocolate into his
mouth and went on, “some might reason that this is possibly one side of the
coin. If it were, then I might not be this composed in conveying to you that
this declaration is taking place nearly after close to thirty years of constant
battering. Irrespective of what you may contemplate and draw from it, I am
pleased that I may have inherited numerous traits from my parents’, but one
thing is unquestionable, and that is that I am not an imprint of their egotism.”
When
he was speaking, I once again thought to myself that indeed we are products of
many materials, but we are also the architects of our own life. And we must not
sanction anybody else the right to write our architectural thesis. We must draw
our own lines, ourselves.
We must love
to no expectation, but love those who deserve it. We must also bear in mind
that kindness is rarely recognised by the vile. One cannot pour from an empty
cup, so we must tell ourselves repeatedly that we must first take care of our
own selves before having to become an example to the world. My golden rule, slightly harsh, was also
rather simple: we have been conditioned by society to put parents on a
pedestal, but we need to come out of it. We need to understand that they too
are as human as anyone else, and if they push their luck beyond a point, then
it is not blasphemy to tiptoe away, because like any other relationship, even
that with your parents comes with an expiry date. Be it the words of my friend, the crux of Ho Mann Jahaan,
or my own aristocratic childhood, we must each tell ourselves that tender-heartedness and
togetherness is more important than anything else in this arid and treacherous
world.
The strongest point of Ho Mann Jahaan is its endearing and also enduring
positivity that Manizeh brings to the growth of the story. Her part has been drawn
out with a certain sense of maturity—not screaming feminist or overtly woman
centric—albeit of a woman who has an independent and balanced mind. Mahira Khan
is the correct candidate to portray those qualities; she sports the accurate
amount of gentleness, steeliness, elegance, kindness, composure, courage,
confidence, intelligence, reflection, humility, honesty and love. One glance at
her and you know that she is about expensive styles, and someone who would not
settle for anything but the best, and she is all of that for the screen, however,
when in her sincerest elements, Mahira is intensely realistic and someone who
can laugh at herself without ever having to think twice about it. There is
refinement in her manner. Outrageously attractive, she has the ability to
seduce the world with her eyes and the mere twitch of her lips, making her an ideal
idol throughout social classes.
Adeel Husain as Nadir has a dashing-woody-vulnerability
to him. He grabs the screen with his restrained magnetism. He is uncannily
hearty, and yet business-like with others, but when he is with his leading lady
he is the savviest romantic, and that affinity and tenderness is immediately
visible, which he conceals from the others. Adored the method in which he
trades one-liners rather nervously when he is in the car mustering up the
courage he can muster up prior to proposing to his ladylove. He makes comedy
such a cheerful courtship ritual without losing the importance of his intention.
Sheheryar Munawar, besides being the
producer of HMJ, has an incredible level of spirited naughtiness
that is dipped in wisdom, as well as being naïve to a level of adorable absurdity.
He enacts his scenes with such care that he brings to it his own energy that
outshines everyone else who are sharing screen space with him, and still not
making himself look awfully good at the expense of the others. He executes his
witticisms with great zest, never letting us forget at the same time that the
character is behaving like an angry, selfish, opinionated young man, or even an
oaf, only because he does not wish to ruin his friendship with his best friend, and
the woman, whom he surreptitiously admires, and has feelings for, even though she
considers him nothing but a good friend.
Sonya Jehan as Sabina
is a prudent prop that facilitates Arhan come to terms with his shortcomings.
She is the type of suave woman any man would wish for, but would find hard at
the same time to obtain because she is not someone to be swayed most easily
considering that her decisions aren’t based on her emotions but intellect.
Hamza Ali Abbasi as
Malang Baba is effective. Syra Yousuf is quite the calm counterpart to the
undulating temperament of Arhan. The rest of the cast from Bushra Ansari who
plays Nadir’s mother to Bilal Maqsood and Faisal Kapadia who appear in cameos
again are befitting to the characters chosen for them.
Fawad Afzal
Khan plays Rafael. Drawing heavily from Pauline Kael’s philosophy I would say
that men want to be as fortunate and privileged as him. In short, they want to
be like him! And women imagine landing him. He draws womenfolk to him by making
them feel he needs them, yet the last thing he would do, would be to come right
out and say it. He is not a conqueror, but a winner. Like a fairy-tale hero he
gets the happy-go-lucky, humorous girl by beguiling her into going after him,
but she has to pass through the trials: she has to trim her cold or pompous
adversaries; she has to dispel his fog. As an actor he is supremely confident,
earthy, irresistible, gallant, gentlemanly and charming so much so that every
woman aches to be his date, on or off the screen. Like Robert Redford, he is
sexiest in films in which the woman is the antagonist and all the film’s erotic
energy is concentrated on him.
Ho Mann Jahaan teaches us that
togetherness with the people who matter to us is like what water is to fish, we
will whither if we find ourselves deprived of that permutation. HMJ teaches us
that the ones whom we love are the very fibre of our existence. And that such
love does not have to be blood-related, that anybody who loves you like family
is family. HMJ teaches us that doubt is quite like white ants that devour
whatever comes in their path. HMJ teaches us that anger seeps into our life
without a murmur and makes a mess of it. So the best way is to stay clear of
it. HMJ teaches us that society is intrinsically important but not when it
prods us to keep changing with it like storms take to the waves. HMJ teaches us
that parents can also be lethal emotional
blackmailers: we must love them, but keep our ears and eyes open. HMJ teaches us that no matter how satisfied and joyous we feel on the surface level,
we are all melancholic by nature. Being loved and loving are our basic
requirements, and as much as we claim we are selfless human beings, we need to
be made to feel secure deep within the layer of our souls, and only when that
happens do we let those who make us feel that way make their home in our
hearts. HMJ teaches
us that ‘bond’ is something that is unshakable within a clique. People may
disagree, and they may want to bite each other’s heads off, but the unification
of what binds them is far stronger than what divides them. In summary, Ho Mann
Jahaan is a complete circle of a significant journey where everything is
communicated to you in the clearest manner and yet left to your own
interpretation of it.
The music by Zebunissa Bangash, Atif
Aslam and Faakhir Mehmood is magnificent. The film realised by Salman Razzaq Khan deft camerawork reminded
me of the aura of the old movies, particularly the decorum in them. How
beautiful it is indeed that you do not have to make love, or to lock lips on
the screen to depict love in order to increase viewership. That depth works any
day as opposed to frivolity, and this credit, once again goes entirely to Asim
Raza for his prudence in penning an excellent story. The dialogues by Yasir
Hussain are relatable and about lyrical in several instances. Rashna Abidi and
Imtisal Abbasi have kept a steady grasp on their screenplay, while Amir Saif
has made certain that nothing dips anywhere by cutting the film cleverly.
“Main toh sab ki aankh ka ishaara samajh
leta hoon, par mujhe sab kuch kyun kehna padhta hai.”
That was the deal sealer. That is a
universal feeling every human being who cares for everyone else but themselves
feels. The world functions like that – they rarely acknowledge what one is
doing for them. They gripe about the odd ways of life, and when someone does
anything for them they don’t have the courtesy of respecting the person, or,
what they do for them. They take the giver for granted. Only that our creator
has given the people who give to the world such unending reserves of love and
affection, that despite facing dryness in their own lives, they still have a
smile on their lips, and something positive to offer to those around them.
These are the people you need to love and respect and not those who sponge
about you to make use of you for them.
