Errata: The movie that I wrote about in my previous blog entry is called Saraansh and not Sangharsh. The error is regretted.

I realised I made a mistake when I was reading a critical text this afternoon sitting on the very same bean bag I had mentioned in my previous blog. To take a break from reading, I looked at the ventillator and the name came to me.

There is a movie called Sangharsh too but I don't remember whether I have seen it and who is in it. I guess I'll get some info about it if I google it but then who cares? When you don't remember it, I guess, you didn't find it worth remembering.

This mistake however is a good case of Freudian slip. There is so much sangharsh in Bhatt's movie that I am not at all amazed that I remember that as the name of the movie.

By the way, I don't think I figured out, ever, why that movie was called Saaransh. This word loosely translates to the word 'essence' and in Hindi it is used most frequently in the phrase jeevan ka saaransh which can be replaced in English by the often heard, rather resigned, rhetorical question "Is this what life is about?" I remember one of my brothers, aged about 20 then, was hugely disappointed and visibly upset when a friend of the family, whom we were are all rather fond of, chose to call his newly built house Saaransh. Being a graduate student in a competitive English department then, I promptly wondered about intrepretation and misintrepretation but somehow my brother and I never got around to talking about that again.

In our Hindi speaking consciousness this word has a negative tinge if not a totally negative connotation. Just as most English speakers are uncomfortable with the word 'clever' becuase they promptly associate it with 'cunning' and not with 'intelligent'.

Now the question is, why did Mahesh Bhatt choose to give this title to this movie? Especially when the last shot is of the old couple sitting on a park-bench in soft sunlight and the pleasant cliche of their son's ashes turning into grass after all those grey and dark frames of a bleak corridor, ventillators and ceiling fans? Bhatt must've been a rather young man when he made this movie. I would say somewhere in his mid-30s. The question I'd like to ask Mr. Bhatt, if I ever meet him, would be this: Why call that movie Saaransh?