Why Dunki will stand by the test of time?

 In today's time, there is a normalcy of excess pleasure, desire to consume pleasure again and again. There is a pressure within the society to consume pleasure more and more. Mass scale cinema with spectre, big budget, high promotion, story, characters, plotline often are consciously playing to this psyche of excess consumption. This excess consumption through the aesthetics of cinema often leads to a harassement. In such a harassement process of cinema, the excess and the passion of excess in a cinema hurts the object. Knowingly and unknowingly the cinema watchers can become such an object of a 1000 crore hit or a flop film. So, often a great film can create such a hurtful object of passion or might not. A hit, flop, average, mediocre film can create such hurtful objects unknowingly even through best crafts in a cinema. Hence cinema can create passion which then hurts and leads to harassement even for a fan of a certain cinema or for a one time watcher of the same cinema. Even before the art and craft of cinema comes in, the excess of pleasure, passion can create hurtful harassement. 

The society as it evolves often demands such passion led hurtful objects. In many developed societies, such hurtful excesses are reduced through human right declaration and definition for necrophaliacs. Such right spaces reduces excess of consumption, pleasure, harassment of objectified passion. 

It is over here, even before technical craft of a cinema comes, the characters, stories of characters, plots of a film can win over the excess in a society of excess. Hence characters, story plots of Dunki characters of the latest SRK film does this and wins over Pathan, Jawan and Animal even before the art, craft of cinema sets in. 

Within a society of excess, Dunki regulates our excess through the characters, stories, plots and makes us more human within the passion of an Animal, Jawan, Pathan. Dunki slowly and steadily inspite of its stretched cinematic art, craft, wins our excesses by making us laugh and cry at the same time. In hindsight, the cinema of the camera of Dunki turns out to be the watch tower of a pleasured society and questions its trajectory in the long term. 

A Travelogue of "Yuhi Sath Sath Chalte" - From Shimla to Kolkata via Lacan

 The last two consecutive weeks were quite active and refurbishing in terms of memory revival. As a part of the Yuhi Sath Sath Chalte production shows on two back-to-back Saturdays and Sundays, I was in Shimla and Kolkata. The first show of Yuhi Sath Sath Chalte happened at the famous, historical Gaiety Theatre of Shimla. 

The second show happened at Bharatiya Sanskriti Samsad within the heart of Chowronghee at Kolkata. The team performance evolved, peaked, and attained brilliance in the course of the journey. However, my memories of travel from Shimla to Kolkata only strengthened the belief that truth is always partial. I realized the traumatic truth of unconscious memories of city spaces with which a human being has to live and that is both an absolute and partial truth. This was almost a practical demonstration of Lacan and his psychoanalytical lens where the unconscious is dominated by language and grammar or Hegelian dialectics of recognition. The irrational unconscious has its own grammar and language which is also often Heideggerian, Kantian, and Platonic. If that irrational unconscious has to be unraveled, and deciphered through the metaphors of text, and language then it is often Saussurean as the language of that irrational unconscious space is very linguistic in nature and not defined by psychoanalysis. Within the dying corpse of psychoanalysis, the shows of Yuhi  Sath Sath Chalte opened up more of the irrational unconscious within me. I imagined the triad of Lacan (real, reality, imaginary) not through practice but through a linguistic system of texts coupled with music. 

Lacan when he returned to Freud, reimagined Freud and made him alive by separating him from the dying remnants of Psychoanalysis. Yuhi Sath Sath Chalte script, texts, words, and linguistics made me return to Freud, not through the popular, mainstream space of ego, libidinal suppression, dream, and projections of clinical on the nonclinical realities. It made me see the triad of Lacan of real, reality, and imaginary through the grammar and language of texts and the system of interpreting and reading those texts coupled with music, track, rhythm, travel language and grammar.

The travel of "Yuhi Sath Sath Chalte" made me return to my memories of Shimla, Kolkata through Gaiety Theatre, Mall Road, Chowronghee through a linguistic and textual practice of Lacan. I understood how to read Lacan through "Yuhi Sath Sath Chalte" even though Zizek also had done the same thing. He pushed us to read texts, the system of texts through the lens of Lacan and his works.

The travel of Yuhi Sath Sath Chalte helped me to practice it more and I understood what Lacan made and how he saved Freud through the poststructuralism of 50s when brain science, medicine, pills and hedonism took the space of psychoanalysis.

I am sure, the next shows of Yuhi Sath Sath Chalte will help me understand Lacan a little more.