03 May 2014, 10:04 AM IST
As Theodore Roosevelt observed many years ago "a vote is like a rifle: its usefulness depends on the character of the user". The current election in India has proved to be so polarising that it is nigh impossible to hold a conversation, irrespective of political affiliation, without facing a barrage of statistics and being subjected to moral acrobatics about the definition of good and evil and the differences between civil unrests, pogroms, communal riots and genocides. Whether one talks of the economy or of sectarian violence, statistics are fired off as answers and in this bewilderingly partisan atmosphere, all talk of the individual citizen of India rarely ventures beyond the sweeping generalisations.
Given all this, a film on YouTube called Bombay Mirror is a welcome invitation to step back and think about ourselves as individuals and our relationship to the other individuals rather than focusing on the state. Directed by Shlok Sharma who describes it as 'a dig against fanaticism,' the film stars Rajkumar Rao and Vijay Maurya.
The scene is of a barber shop in Bombay that has just opened for business. The opening shot is of a cut-throat razor being cleaned. A man walks into the shop and asks for a shave. The barber, whose name we later find out is Rakesh, knows him well and immediately asks Shakeel to show him 'a clip' on his mobile. However, Shakeel is in a rush as he has to go to a job interview. The men settle down and talk about how Rakesh met Shakeel's mother in the market and how she worries about her son's future, how another acquaintance called Saleem was caught by the police eve-teasing girls. The scene is of two normal young people, who albeit from different backgrounds, share many things. As Rakesh lathers Shakeel's face a man walks in and cautions 'don't come out.' The camera zooms onto Rakesh's hands as he prepares the razor blade while he laughingly dismisses the man. Suddenly a brawl breaks out outside and a group of Muslim men, identifiable because of their white caps are seen through the doorway of Rakesh's shop stabbing a man who they accuse of molesting their mothers and daughters. Unlike the men, Shakeel, apart from his name is not visibly identifiable as Muslim. Both Shakeel and Rakesh stare as the man is killed. As the victim is stabbed Rakesh turns around to look at Shakeel. His hand, holding the cut-throat, hovers near the latters throat. Just as Shakeel take his name, pleading, 'Rakesh Bhai' for the first time in the film, Rakesh slits his throat and then runs out to help the victim. As he reaches the door, a voice scream 'cut' and we see the commotion of a film-set, with cameramen running around, a director shouting instructions and a police man asking who the star is and whether they want to start a riot? He briefly looks at Rakesh and probably assumes he is part of the set. Rakesh, turns around and pulls down his shutter as we hear Shakeel breathe his last.
Tarika Khattar, a friend who works on Sadat Hasan Manto, pointed out that Bombay Mirror is similar to much of Manto's work. In particular she was reminded of the short story 'Sorry,' translated below.
"The Knife
Ripping through the belly,
reached his navel
and cut through the pyjama's cord.
The killer then
spontaneously apologetically exclaimed
Oh dear…Mishtake!'
The brilliance of the story lies in its ambiguity in that all we know is that the killer and victim are of the same religion and that the killer attacked the victim because he went by some superficial marker. . They could be Hindu or Muslim. What makes the story particularly chilling is the shocking normality of the ending.
The film similarly highlights the way in which a person who knows another can view them as an enemy or even non-human because of external events. The use of a small room is particularly apt as it serves as a metaphor about the limitations that necessarily contribute to our opinions about the world and what we see. Rakesh's door was his only window onto the street and curtains blocked him from seeing the film set. When he pulls down his shutter at the end, his shop is enveloped in darkness, which is not only something that Shakeel has been condemned to but also something that Rakesh's conscience will have to inhabit, whether as a fugitive or in jail. The use of the cut-throat razor, its cleaning at the beginning and it being stained with blood at the end also underscores how everyday objects become instruments of evil. One sees then how a normal young person is driven to commit murder without being motivated by some deep underlying prejudice or being a psychopath. It would be wrong to label Rakesh as simply communal because that morning when Shakeel walked in he was his friend. It is the manipulation of our world-view that results in its distortions and contortions. These in turn are the result of a combination of how forces external to us to feed us a particular point of view and the way in which individual's insist on refusing to question their own views and opinions.
In three minutes this powerful film raises many of the questions that Hannah Arendt writes about in her famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil. 1984 and 2002 are often mentioned as part of the ongoing debates in India but it is often forgotten that many of the people who participated in these acts of violence were normal people as Arendt argues. Of course the Swami Aseemanands, Babu Bajrangi's, Hafiz Saeed's and Mullah Omar's of the world exist but they are much easier to counter than that sinister darkness that has the ability to poison normal people and turn them into bigots and killers. The film could just as easily have had a Muslim perpetrator and a Hindu victim and to get into this argument would obscure the larger point the film makes which is to force us to confront the possibility of evil lurking within a dark corner within ourselves.
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