a thousand desires and one fist-sized heart

I joined Delhi University (DU) in 1999. (Which in all fairness, isn't very far behind.) University was a shock after school. When we moved from the age of school uniforms to uniform of denim and cheeky tshirts, we were buying into so many cultures and legends. Legends of a professor who killed you with her jokes, and another who drank rum from a coke can in class. Of students who had managed to not graduate for seven years, of coconut biscuit makers who knew the internal politics of the college administration, the halogen lamp's resident ghost and of cranky buildings.

It was a heady time. Walking in rallies, holding banners, and been shown the glare-eye by a cop. Shouting slogans that have been re-hashed over the years. A particular favourite was Knicker Dhaari.. Atal Bihari (Trans: Shorts wearing - Atal Behari), which basically meant you were shouting that Atal Bihari was a member of the khaki short wearing RSS.

When we were in Bombay, Sri and I one afternoon picked up Hazaaron Khwahishen Aisi (HKA) (watery Trans: A thousand desires as these) without quite realizing what the movie was about. And you know how some movies are... You feel like they stepped into your own illusions and stole the way your heart was used to pumping. HKA was something like that. There are too many reviews online so I am not going to attempt an educated view, instead perhaps I am more focussed on the emotional response. The characters were all too well known. The Punjabi boy with a family business (from carpets to politics). The girl attracted to the idealist. The ism loving idealist who finds absolute pleasure in quoting Marx, Guevara and lives in a poster-ideal world. The drunkards, the dopies and the mopies.

In DU, one was constantly bumping against the legendary 70s. Of absconding men hidden in the students' hostel, and of the saree-wearing Woodstock-loving generation. And HKA brings back that world. Because in those short three years everyone has a brief affair with ideals. The magic of perfectly symmetrical theories. And then they grow into their jobs and merge into other halfs. And remain legends scratched on the walls of student infested cafes. This movie brings to life what has been denied to us in our history books. The emergency of the 70s, JP Movement, the Gandhian family politics, the conflict of desires and dreams and the love stories that must have met premature ends in the troubled times. The music is haunting and sets the mood to extent of wetting your eyes (RealPlayer required).

And then the movie takes you into the depths of battlefields, far away from campus parties to places in UP where the stick does a lot of the talking, and the geographical expanses which the revolution forgot. The heritage of anonymous blood and a few famous books. And how people change. And even as you watch the movie, you struggle to understand who the hero is. I could relate to each of the characters. Their families, intentions, and their set of thousand desires.

Above all it is a love story. Set in the backdrop of a changing world. And what a tender love story. Because you never know who the lovers are. It is something you perceive. Because actions such as these could only be motivated by love, and the accompanying incomprehensible madness.

The title of the movie is borrowed from Ghalib's soulful Ghazal. And in a sense, it lends a timelessness to the quest for our thousand desires. And evokes the image of youth - now tired enough to sleep.

[movies, hindi, india, history]