A monk in white robe, having an umbrella in his hand keep on
walking and walking and walking to the destination of immortality, in spiritual
term we call it liberation or enlightenment. He could have taken a bus, or any
medium to reach to the destination, but his inner strength did not allow him to
do that, no short cut for the enlightenment. So, in whole movie he was walking
in silence or silencing in discourse. That means we are bound to see the long
stretched roads in the midst of the traffic or field of wind mills. I am
talking about the character of the movie called “Ship of Theseus”. The movie is
shear piece of brilliance, the panorama of art, the result of perfect blend of
art and intellect. At one instance when conversation reach to the utmost level of
intellect where two people discuss the difference between a normal human being
and the monk – For you all human beings are same, for him(monk) all beings are
same. The line reminded me on stroke of masterpiece of a master. Spirituality
is a journey from nobody to somebody and from somebody to everybody.
The monk is not the only character of the movie. There are
two other characters also on which the camera gets pan – A blind young lady
photographer and a young money minded share broker having the genes of
“kranti”. In the end movie portrays that all three has become one just because
each one has got the transplanted body parts of the same man defining the
contradictory question of “Ship of Theseus”, whether an object will remain same
if all the parts are replaced with new one?
The movie leaves some real life situations intact. These
situations are the sense of attachment of to the old habits, even though new
has been introduced. The girl gets new eyes and can see the colorful world now
but she lost the inner instinct of photography, which she had when she was
blind. She chose to blindfold herself to get the same instinct but didn’t get.
As we are so accustomed to the blindness poverty,
corruption and untruth that even though someone donates the hope, we choose to
blindfold ourselves.
Second instance is perfect example of
attachment in the name of detachment. We choose spirituality to liberate
ourselves but at the times when spirituality itself becomes the attachment. The
monk who was fighting for the non-violence captivated himself in doing violence
to his own body by not taking medicine for a chronic disease. This also reminds
me the boundaries that we have created around us in the name of religion and
now the walls are so high that we became prisoner of our own prison. The
religion became religious suffering and spiritualism became spiritual parasite.
Whenever I visit to someone’s I prefer to see the place of God in that house.
Surprisingly I find that smaller the house bigger the picture of god and also
the number of pictures are more. People living in that house has got very high
faith on those posters, contrary to that the allotted space and size of picture
remains comparably small in bigger houses. I call it the inversely proportional
acquisition of god. I am still confused who the god is…lol.
Third instance portrays a confused
happy mind. A person for him the definition of happiness is money and enjoying
the materialism of life but his own DNA which came from her “Nani ma – a
revolutionary lady, fought for freedom and social justice”, push himself for
something good. He chooses that way and tries to help a poor “Shankar (God’s
name...again lol)”. After some success, when he was about to reach the final
destination of the justice, “Shankar” compromises with the other party of 6.5
lakh rupees. And this man remains like an isolated boat in the midst of the
river, depressed, dejected and disgraced. In the end her nani-ma tells him: “Itna
hi hota hai (Only this much happens)”.
The movie is based on a paradox
that if all the planks of a ship will be changed than whether the ship will be
the same or new, but for me it gave different reflections of life such as the
development of our point of view is more or less based on our comfort, Sometimes
even the thing which we needed the most cannot give us the expected joy and we
became frontier for someone, we fight for that person, we make efforts for his
or her happiness but on the finishing line when we look back we don’t find the
same person with us. Because…“Itna hi hota hai”
