In the entertainment world, which is dominated by commercial films and videos, a film of this sort is rare and rather unheard of! I am not talking about the films of the sort which Indian film doyen Satyajit Ray made, which ran empty halls in the city, while acclaimed all over the world. I am talking about Bommalattam (Doll's play), a full-length feature film in Tamil made by the famous film director Bharati Raja! It is not that I am fond of the films of Bharati Raja, who always had a social issue to present in his films, but as I sat to relax in front of the television, I found something very different in this film, very different from the usual soap-operas and the tear-jerkers!
The fact that Nana Patekar, whom I consider as a serious actor, happened to act in a Tamil feature film meant that it was not going to be yet another love story! The theme looked so very complicated, but after the denoument, one realizes that the plot has been weaved in such a way that the story was hanging together, and one could vibrate with the hero fighting a fierce battle against a society which only knows how to condemn the vulnerable! The director had handled the characters in the film not only with the usual passion, but more with com-passion, and that made this film a very different sort for me!
I consider myself a person who has limited, selective memory! In certain cases, my memory is shart, though I cannot claim it is photographic, but fairly good; but when it comes to storylines, novels, and even blogs, I have a bad memory! Sometimes when I go back to some of my old writings, I feel amazed and ask myself if I had done it! I might have read a novel some years ago, but when I read it again, without realizing that I had read it earlier, I can vaguely remember some isolated characters, but not the story. I feel terrible when many of my friends can remember the storyline of a novel or a film they had read/seen many years ago. I even envy them.
In all walks of life today, the slogan is 'passion', and if there is one life-force which is keeping the present world alive, it is the passion of a handful of people, igniting the lives of others. Passion in life, passion in workplace, passion in relationships, and passion in being. What perhaps the today's world lacks is com-passion! I am not talking about charity or gift or obligatory social commitment corporate houses are expected to fulfil, in order to get the tax exemption! Compassion goes beyond all scales and measurements, and one gets countless number of opportunities to show one's compassion today: it would be wrong to consider that only the human beings demand our compassion, the plants and beasts, the earth and the universe - all are in need of human compassion.
Compassion also demands that we throw away our law-books in order to uphold humanity, or life in one form or other. If the law of the land becomes the most important criteria for judging people (and I would not belittle the importance of the law of the land in any way), then we would be forced to throttle true justice, which goes beyond laws and regulations. The Doll's Play fortunately upholds such a kind of compassionate justice, which can change the face of the world sooner than we think! Every human person is invited to become agents of compassion, and the day when even a toddler looks at the plants and beasts, other toddlers with compassion, then we can see a thousand suns and moons rising around us!
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