Skip to main content

Watching Seemabaddha

I had watched Seemabaddha as a child - one of the many efforts of my parents to get me "cultured" We never lived in Bengal and I did not have peers who spoke the language - so watching Bangla movies was one of their ways of giving me practice with language comprehension. I recall asking them to repeat what the characters in the movie said in "plain" Bangla. Often they would explain what I missed on the way back home. I enjoyed these movies mainly on account of the snacks I got during the interval.

Watching it recently was a wonderful experience. The finer plot points made sense this time. The wordplay is subtle and the characters have few if any degrees of freedom. They are all constrained (seemabaddha translated to English). The protagonist Shyamal Chatterjee is a product of where he comes from and who he aspires to be - that forms his set of constraints. The wife has her entire identify tied to his success and her constraints are defined by how far her husband can rise in his career.

The sister-in-law defines what lies outside Shyamal's constraints. She tells him the truth, feels a mix of admiration and disdain for him, she flirts with him with the confidence of a woman who knows her mind. Sudarshana is the breath of fresh air Shyamal's life lacks and truth be told the woman he would rather be with. Her approval matters to him and it is hard to come by. The story of greed and immorality in the pursuit of professional success was not what this movie was about for me - that felt like the scaffolding for the story of a man's constraints to hang on - constraints of his own choosing that end up being the trap he cannot escape.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more