Does God Play Dice?. Review on Dhoop

==Yeh Maha-Vir Chakra Shaheed Capt. Rohit Kapoor ke baap ka haath hain. Aap na rokein to hi behtar hain…

—Albert Einstein.

(Context: A German, Heisenberg, showed that there is a certain limit to the accuracy of any measurement and it can not be made more than a certain value. Einstein denied this. He replied to this principle saying that things had to be very certain because God won’t play on dice!)

Does God Play Dice?

This country is full of the deprived and the depraved. Poverty, discrimination, sectarianism and narrow-mindedness are all inevitable consequences of orthodoxy—a plague that hasn’t left us yet! Some rise beyond it by way of rebellion and some by finding themselves carried away by the rare winds of change. Yet, the attitude of deprivation and insecurity lingers. Being deprived is one thing! The deprived find their deprivation coming to an end. But they morph to depraved beings—gourmandizing everything that comes in their way. Greed—great, gluttonous, vicious greed—that is what you find in them!

It is not easy to isolate the single and absolute factor that conceived corruption in our system. But it is this grab-grab-grab attitude, this greed mingled with an unwarrantable attitude of martyrdom and intoxication of suddenly found power that forms the warp and woof of corruption. Can you deny corruption? Look around you—Your police are corrupt. Your doctors are corrupt. Your bankers are corrupt. Your social workers are corrupt. Your pedagogues are corrupt. Your public servants are corrupt. Your tax officials are corrupt. And face it my friend… somewhere, deep down inside, you are corrupt!

We all believe that we deserve our fundamental rights. To call them rights and then to talk of undeserving is meaningless, any way! But how many of us can exercise it without having to pause and look around in search of cover for “just in case”? Do you dare speak out whenever on whatever? Do you dare question an official who refuses to give you what is rightfully yours? Ah wait—I know what you’re going to say—You’re going to say, “Oh yes, I do! I dare!”

A pack of lies indeed! All of us—one and all—are pacifists. If five thousand rupees as bribe can get your tax refund of fifteen thousand, you will most certainly grease those palms. You only want your work done. There you go! And you thought corruption is a one-handed clap?

Being a pacifist is one thing—but we are worse. We are weak pacifists. Corrupt power may not only block your access to your right temporarily—sometimes, they might snatch it away from you and refuse it to you! They will warn you, intimidate you and threaten you. And out of a hundred among us, seventy five will shrug and say—“well we aren’t starving now so, why kick a sleeping tiger?” And you thought corruption comes clapping on your outstretched hand? Oh, no, no, no! You’re clapping almost readily on an outstretched palm yourself! Grease, money and servility alongside!

You and “the system” are not two separate entities, mind you. You are a small part of it! Do you know how a malfunction happens? Some cog or gear in the large machine starts doing something that it shouldn’t. In an inanimate machine running on fuel, the defective gear receives overwhelming opposition from the rest of the lot. And the system comes to a grinding halt.

But our system is intelligent! Of course, comprising of living people, it is certainly obeying premises of Darwinism and adaptation! When a biggish gear or cog starts going the other way, the gears connected with it think—“Who wants the friction and the massive breaking stress? Let’s go counter-clockwise too!” You can bring the system to a grinding halt—but you’re scared to do that! Because then you’re risking damage on your own self! Ah! And don’t tell me you’re going to say, “you’re wrong, Juggernaut!”, Monsieur Pacifist!

Well there’s a quirky cog in any lot! Among these cozy cogs, intelligently adapting to the larger, possibly corrupt cog, there will probably be one that won’t budge—a cog that won’t go any other way but the correct way! Who? I don’t know! Nobody does! But if there is a God in heaven, I’m sure there will be one… I don’t see too many of them, however… may be he’s waiting for the figure of six to show up on the dice he’s rolling… may be if that shows up, he’ll send our messiah… Who knows anything for certain? Oh dear, Heisenberg in politics, is it?

Or may be, my friend, you landed on this planet after that figure of six showed up!

Answer me!

The Review

Dhoop is the story of the father of a martyr who laid down his life fighting for his country—the story of that father who finds himself amidst gourmandizing vultures, ready to prey on the slightest sign of weakness. He finds himself amidst a group of influential people—people more influential than him in society—grabbing and snatching at every opportunity—worse than a starving beggar! Dhoop is nothing but the very discussion we just had in the preceding paragraphs!

The families of all martyrs, who lost their sons to the war for Kargil, were promised a petrol pump. But they found themselves with only a declaration and a few newspaper cuttings—nothing more concrete! Most lost their hopes to the incessant nagging and intimidating of corrupt officials… Just one dared cackle his fingers and fight back. And it was no surprise! Voh Maha-Vir Chakra Shaheed Capt. Rohit Kapoor ke baap thein!

Screenplay and Music

One must excuse a movie of this class from our demands cinematic excellence. What does it matter if the music is worth twenty five repitions on your MP3 player or not? And what does it matter if the screenplay kept you clutching the arms of your chair in suspense? However, from the eyes of the churlish, it was not exceptionally brilliant on this particular account. But I am not going to withdraw stars from it for just that much!

Cast Performance

OM Puri plays the father to perfection. It takes him absolutely no effort to slip out of himself and pull us all into an intimate audience of the character itself! Bravo!

Gul Panag and Revathi play the daughter (or is it?) and wife of the betrayed father. The two of them play a brilliant part in raising this movie from the level of a visual-on-screen to an experience of living an old memory. Bravo, again!

Footnote

Such movies leave you with a lot, lot more to say—and MouthShut leaves you with little space to say it all in one place! I’ll be explaining myself completely to you if you simply…

GO WATCH IT!