Gehraiyaan: Just a perspective (not really)

Water, Seas, Oceans; such cliched images to represent the depth of human lives.

Gehraiyaan tries to portray the complexity of human behaviour by eliminating the absolute hero and absolute villain, in addition to the romanticised idea of love. The trailer makes it an obvious cliffhanger if the couple-in-affair are going to get together or not. But I am not here to speak about that. What I found interesting was not the plot but those little life messages that were hidden in the subplots that manages to make a place for itself in this movie.

Deepika’s character Alisha craves for emotional and economic security and has managed to attach the fulfillment of the two to the idea of ‘happiness’. In this pursuit of her happiness, she is trapped in her traumatic past and ongoing monotony, only to find a sense of (not complete, maybe a little bit) of liberation when she has ‘the’ conversation with her father. Even before this, it was Zain (played by Siddhanth Chaturvedi) who comes into her life to teach her self-respect and self-worth while ironically, Zain himself was caught up in the tangle of subordination.

This movie is filled with paradoxes. This movie is about the past, people of the present living in the past, running away from the past, failing to acknowledge the present, until a wise man tells ‘your mother was more than just her one mistake. I wished I had understood this before, it is important to accept the past instead of running away from it because life has to move on’. This was where I broke down. This is what the world needs.

Gehraiyaan isn’t just about the depth but the paradoxical elements that bind our lives. Each character is traumatized by the past that haunts their present followed by an insane amount of self-pity. Each one is toxic in their own ways, selfish in their own ways. This reminds me of Joey from ‘F.R.I.E.N.D.S’ when he says to Phoebe, ‘there is no selfless deed’. In that sense, we are all selfish. But.. but what?

Does Alisha’s father being silent mean he is selfish or selfless?

Does Alisha seeking her happiness for herself a selfish or a selfless act?

For how long can we keep seeking and for how long can we keep breaking that monotony in our lives?

How long do we keep waiting for a change?

How long do we keep acting on our desired choices and how long do we refrain from making any choice?

Well, we all are caught in this paradox of emotions; shallow and deep, between the shades of rainbow and the shades of grey.