Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Gandhi, my father

Directed by the playwright Feroze Abbas Khan, executive producer - the famous Anil Kapoor. With a star cast like Akshay Khanna, Shefali Shah, Darshan Jariwala ... it was expected to be an intense and well made movie.
Gandhi - like most of us who have read him in school history books is The Father of the Nation. The movie focuses on his inability to be a good father to his children. How ironic....a father to the Nation but not to ones own children.
The movie is intense with some brilliant acting by the experienced and reputed stars.

At the end of the movie I was pretty much in a dilemma wondering...
  1. whether Gandhi was instrumental in ruining Hiralal's (his eldest son's life) life or was it destiny.
  2. would it have helped if The Mahatma had sent Hiralal to England to become a barrister
  3. was Hiralal smart enough to have become a good barrister given that despite repeated attempts he did not even clear his matriculate exams. So what if he was not able to complete it at a young and had to reattempt when he was much older...I don't think age makes it so difficult to get back to school.
  4. was Gandhi right in making his son the sacrificial lamb for his Satyagraha movement
  5. would things have really been different if he had educated his son much earlier
The movie left me wondering whether seeing, hearing, reading is always believing???? Part truth can be more disastrous than the complete one.

Yes, may be the Mahatma always stood by his principles of righteousness, but at what cost?! Was he not being selfish by using his son to meet his ends.

I will always continue to wonder......

1 comment:

manu said...

Yeah, I too have always wondered about this irony of Gandhiji being the the father of the nation but not to his own children or family. I think that one needs to put in as much passion and energy into parenting as one does into his profession and work. Strike a balance between professional life and personal life.