finally watched 'Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi'...
once in way...in an industry dominated by bubblegum cinema...there comes a filmmaker who is grounded in reality...someone who uses films as an opinion...as a statement...as a tribute...

Sudhir Mishra captures the heady idealism of the late sixties and the early seventies well...the failed state...the rising student movement...the Naxalite movement...justification for violence..."Violence of the oppressors is wrong..but violence of the oppressed is right."..dreams of a few to create a new social order in a society that has been marred by too many in built contradictions...the fight for freedom in a 'free' country...disillusionment with a supposedly socialist state...disappointment with Nehru...hatred for Indira and everything she stood for...the contradictions in the idea of revolution...which i found akin to Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide...

Mumbai needed a movie like this..i am sure...but..sadly we still remain too distanced from the core of everything..there is obviously something fundamentally wrong with the way we think...which is why when someone like Ashutosh Gowariker calls Hazaaron...the most important political epic of our times...you realise that he too is a product of a society that is largely dominated by the monority called 'aspirational India'...'petty bourgeosie' some call them...and that is precisely why the statement gains an added importance in the current context...it is reflective of a section that is totally unaware of another section's inhuman existence...

and some things will remain...i guess..fundamentally wrong...what else could explain one third of the audience walking out of the film after the interval...

nonetheless...i am feeling more guilty than ever about every choice i make...