Haider is the creative pursuit of life’s unpredictability
It was a brave attempt to watch Haider, especially after a barrage of unfavourable and unforgiving reviews about Vishal Bharadwaj's shallow and imperfect understanding of Kashmir and its underbelly. But I am a self-confessed fan of his art of handling rather delicate issues with great finesse, as he has in the past. I therefore, wanted to have my say in writing him off, if need be.
But for me, Haider turned out to be a bit of Hamlet in more ways than one. All because I chose to view it through the prism of human nature and not geography or history. For time immemorial, between when Hamlet and Haider were born, the biggest tragedy of life is the infallible reality of human weakness.
Be it Hamlet, Haider or life in general, in the end, you have to forgive each character for being so vulnerable and human, with all the perfect imperfections of lust, temptations, aspirations, desires - the dark virtues that make us dig our own graves, to finally rest in them. (Maybe, Vishal should have steered clear of trying to give the movie a historical layer to save the creative messenger from getting shot).
And what makes it even more Hamletian for me is the timing. My fraternity of Kashmiri Pandits is livid that the movie starts post 1995, completely insensitive towards the ethnic cleansing that Kashmir witnessed post 1889.
I agree that if I had watched the movie before the Kashmir floods, I would have been equally bitter and vindictive towards Vishal's use of creative discretion of highlighting the agony of just one community. But, today I must say that nature's poetic justice permits me to be more forgiving.
The situation in Kashmir has changed between yesterday and today and so has my reaction just as would stand true for all Shakespearean characters in their various roles.
In Haider, the Doctor disappearing gives his wife & his brother the situation (opportunity) to live their romance & lust; Haider's quest to find his father makes a bloodthirsty rebel out of a literature-loving poet - when Haider's mother holds the revolver to her temple the first time to force her son into giving in, we can mistrust her intent, but when she pulls the pin off the grenade, the situation has changed and there is no reason for mistrust. Reactions are situational, fuelled by individual experiences & opportunities.
In a nutshell, even though a Kashmiri Pandit, it gives me more satisfaction to analyse the movie as a creative pursuit of life's unpredictability & our own peculiarity, oddity, eccentricity as Shakespearean characters that we play in our lifetime, than a political discourse on the rights and wrongs about Kashmir. Buy that?