GUZAARISH Fulfilled…

“Tera zikr hai ya itra hai, jab jab karta hu, mahakta hu, behakta hu, chahakta hu;
Sholo ki tarah mastiyon me uchhalta hu……..”

Can the memory of a beloved person be described better? I don’t think so. It exactly describes the feeling of a person when he hears the name of his beloved. Anyone who has loved truly even once in his lifetime can understand these emotions perfectly. These are the lyrics of the song (I don’t know whether it’s famous or not which is actually a tragedy for such a beautiful song) from the love-coated movie GUZAARISH..! From the time I watched DEVDAS from the God of grand-cinema maker Mr.Sanjay Leela Bhansali (fondly called SLB by us), I have been in awe of this director. My closest friend-circle are kind of hooked to SLB’s DEVDAS not because we relate to his story in any way but every dialogue and every setting of this film is just awe-inspiring to say the least and like “Dil Chahta Hai”, this film in some way or the other had the most influencing effect on us with respect to understanding friendship, love and longing. Now, please don’t argue that a movie or two can have so much of a effect on us, but yes for cinema-crazy people like us, it does. We are from those breed of humankind who strongly believe life is nothing but a big opera-like cinema meant to be lived LARGE and by large, I mean it REALLY LARGE i.e. laugh uncontrollably, love without regretting, giving it all, hate with a vengeance, cry inconsolably i.e. total ‘melodrama’..!

Now when somebody like SLB who’s a master in depicting larger-than-life melodrama gets Hrithik Roshan as his lead actor, eyebrows are bound to be raised. After SLB’s BLACK and Hrithik’s KOI MIL GAYA were released back in 2004-05, the highest anticipation, as a cinema buff, I had was of these two geniuses working together just because they both had raised their bars so high with these two films that it was a salivating prospect to watch their magic unfold together. And unfold it did!
First of all, I want to apologise to all those to whom I had said SLB has copied ideas from the Hollywood classic movie PRESTIGE. Guzaarish could not have been farther from it. While PRESTIGE was all about envy, jealousy, sabotage; GUZAARISH is only about love and the beauty of living life to the fullest. It’s about feeling the emotion in which the protagonist feels like “Keh naa saku itna pyaar, seh naa saku itna pyaar karta hu” which if translated in frugal English goes like this “I love you so much so that I cannot say it to you or even I cannot bear the intensity of my love for you.” The biggest plus-point is when you have Hrithik portraying this intensity or angst to you. The love and suffering are depicted so meticulously by this gem-of-an-actor that you fail to understand what’s actually more between the two. The scene where he asks his mother to pray so that he can fling his arms open, which he cannot, to give her a hug is bound to give you the biggest lump in your throat. Or for that matter every scene featuring the inimitable Aishwarya and Hrithik make it so much more delightful to experience. And what to say about Aish? Does she look beautiful? I sometimes feel this “beautiful” word was itself invented after the world noticed Aish. And for the record I loved her acting as much as her beauty only in this film directly after GURU. Sure, I must have missed many of her films in between but like most others I have been too enveloped by her beauty than her acting skills. Nobody other than her could have done better justice to SLB’s vision of showing a devoted nurse (to a paraplegic) who faces the dilemma whether to support her beloved’s request for Euthanasia. The passion between the two is unrelenting throughout.

The credit for creating this masterpiece should of course go to SLB. There’s his stamp particularly the way in which he builds up his songs or where the camera is panned to Hrithik’s feet trying fruitlessly to feel the water of the sea in the backdrop of the yet-another wonderful song “Sau gram Zindagi……..”(Actually every song is a gem. I can’t say much about music but the ‘lyrics’ of each song is simply intellectually fulfilling). I have only one thing to say- TAKE A BOW, SLB..!

I didn’t want to end this piece this way by writing what I am going to write now but cant help it. There was this guy besides me in the theatre who said after hearing Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s name, he just cannot forget what a dud SAAWARIYA was! It was here I remembered the phrase which goes “No matter how many good saves you make as a goalkeeper, people always remember the odd one which you missed!” So, please for God’s sake, remember that he’s the same man who gave us the eternal HUM DIL DE CHUKE SANAM, KHAMOSHI, DEVDAS and BLACK. And here I know, there are still people who will criticize his films saying they are never close to reality. For them, I have just this one line to say from DEVDAS….

“Kitna itara raha murakh, Taalab ke kamal ko chhodkar, kaagaz ke phool par mandra raha hai..!” (wherein SLB’s movies are the Lotus from the lake and rest many movies churned out mindlessly which we ‘seem’ to like are flowers of paper; so we are the fools who pretend to like the latter!)