The Importance Of Sanjay Leela Bhansali's 'Guzarish'

The film Guzarish was going on in the cinema theatre. Someone guffawed in the row behind. Out of exasperation. His friend moaned the waste of money. "What a lousy movie" was the refrain.

How heartless and insensitive many of us have become.

 But I don't blame the two men in the row behind. Guzarish is not entertaining. Suffering is hardly  entertaining. Perhaps the fault lies with Sanjay Leela Bhansali. He did not market the film as smartly as Aamir had promoted Taare Zameen Par.

The point is Guzarish throws light on quadriplegia. The suffering without any hope of relief or cure. Very few directors have the guts and the sensitivity that Bhansali has. He deserves a pat on the back for making Guzarish.

Guzarish is about suffering and love. There is a lot of the former and too little of the latter. But it seems even love is not enough to endure some types of suffering. The character in Guzarish receives a lot of love but even that wasn't enough for him to desire to continue living.

Guzarish is important because it focuses attention on the extreme suffering a quadriplegic has to endure. The suffering shown in the film is heart-wrenching. The helplessness of the character played by Hrithik Roshan as he has to endure the steady drip of water drops from a leaking roof. This is a form of severe torture. The harmless pit pats of little drops of water after some time sound like maddening blows of a huge hammer.

Or when he screams in agony when Aishwarya Rai's (the woman he loves) evil husband beats her up in front of him.

Nothing could be more demeaning than this.

The film rightly raises the issue of euthanasia. The right to die in dignity rather than live in unending humiliation.'That is why Guzarish is an important film which all of us should watch.

But are we that human and sensitive? I doubt it.