Skip to main content

Perfect Union

Watched Asha Jaor Majhe recently. The only way I can describe it is a bitter-sweet ode to Kolkata. Not a single word is exchanged between the two main characters in the movie and the action takes place in a twenty hour period in the couple's life. Some sequences were too protracted to my taste - maybe because I am Bengali and know all the detail that scene is unfolding too well.

But that aside, it is an amazing movie about what love in marriage might look like where the couple is very young and yet have no time to be together, never mind be intimate. The acts of love are abundant and in fact being able to perform them seems to be the sole source of energy of each of them to carry on with the daily grind of earning a living. 

The fact that the movie is made in 2014 feels wrong in that the Kolkata that unfolds through the scenes is the one I knew from my childhood. One would imagine that things are not the same anymore. The squalid living quarters and crumbling back-alleys are reminiscent of Ritwick Ghatak and Mrinal Sen movies. They reminded me of the places I knew as a child, relatives who lived in homes that looked ready to collapse any minute. 

I want to believe that change has come upon Kolkata too - that people have more choices and better lives than they did back then. Yet, setting the story back in the past takes away from it being the story of a contemporary couple who have a marriage that works like magic. The magic lies in the synchronicity - how they are able to be there for their partner without ever being there physically.

This is the only way perhaps a modern union can work - anywhere in the world. If the two are busy pursuing money, career or dreams there is still a way to be a warm, immovable emotional and spiritual presence in each other's lives. Whether or not it was the director's intent, this movie is about why marriage is so venerated in India -  if the pairing is right, it can to lead to the state of perfect harmony, which serves as an infinite reservoir of strength. 

Comments

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...

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...

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...