On Black Fridays and poignant Tuesdays

"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" - Mahatma Gandhi.

I've seen/ heard this twice this week. Once during Parzania and again in Black Friday. By the end of Parzania, I dragged myself out of the theatre, glum and wondering what Gandhi's own country has done to itself. Black Friday though, ended up being a more cerebral experience. It showed the 1993 blasts from multiple different perspectives. It expressed the internal conflict of both the cop leading the investigations and some of the terrorists involved with the blasts. Maria's (the cop) frustration with the inhumame torture tactics he and his team used to interrogate suspects as well as his own feeling of impotence to change the system - in one scene he calmly informs a group of journalists asking him about the police's methods, that the only way to make the suspects speak was not just by rough-handling them but by doing the same to their women and children. Because the only way to break this kind of terrorist was through humiliation, not physical pain. On the other hand, the film showed the angst of the terrorist Badshah Khan too - eager to be recruited but quick to be disillusioned. While he swore his allegiance to Memon with jest, he was the first to express frustration once the blasts occurred and he had to go into hiding. His frustration with having to move from city to city to hide from the cops while hoping that Memon would call him to Dubai was brilliantly depicted.

The film also asked a few very hard hitting questions (without judgement)... but gave few answers. The last chapter of the film is titled "What is past is prologue". Will Shakespeare's line is well used here. This bit showed the Babri Masjid demolitions, the chaos and riots that followed. Simply put, it informed the audience that the people who lost their family, friends and businesses formed the next recruiting class for terrorism. Babri Masjid set the stage for the Bombay riots. Director Anurag Kashyap says on a Black Friday blog:

"The most time we took in casting was Jaaved Chikna. We couldn’t find one...then one day GK called me..”i have to show you something”. He showed me the audition tape of Arbaaz Ali Khan. I recognised him... Apparently he had heard about the film we were making and he knew we were looking for someone to play Jaaved Chikna. He had known Jaaved Chikna since childhood (he actually knew a lot of them from his Bandra childhood days). A lot of them played cricket together as children before they grew up into what they didn’t know, they would become...he was on board."

Imagine what those ordinary, cricket-playing children would have had to go through in order to be willing to blast a city to its knees.

Black Friday both condemned the blasts and showed the political handling of Babri Masjit as a possible reason for them. But it played both sides without judgement. The only kind of an answer to this cyclical problem was posed by the cop, Maria. In a moment of anger, he tells Badshah Khan that his religious fervour is foolish, as is the fervour of every Muslim or Hindu who performs acts of violence in the name of dharam. Therein lies a semblance of an answer, I think...

There was humour in the film too. The scene that had me in splits was the chor-police chase when 4-5 cops were chasing one of the terrorists through different parts of Mumbai. He keeps escaping and the chase gets longer and harder. By the end of it, one single, very exhausted hawaldar is practically walking 50 metres behind an equally tired terrorist and yelling, "ruk ja yaar"!

A must see... will keep you thinking for days.