It seems that most of the time we walk with eyes open wide, our ears flapping and receiving every word that falls on it without fail. Though our senses work perfectly, but it seems that we hardly see or hear anything. We never feel things as they are and it is a death like state that we exist in where senses fall short in making us look at the reality. It is a sort of bubble that surrounds us, impressions keep hitting its surface but as soon as they strike it, they fall away. It seems that we are unapproachable to reality. In the midst of this numbness, there are some priceless moments of wakefulness where we become alive for a while and our balloon bursts. The state that I am describing is one of destruction, where everything falls apart, same things lose their old meanings and it is then when we come in true touch with reality.
Great people have called this sudden moment of realization as ‘Epiphany’. These epiphanies are the only time that we actually see reality in its true color and they make us realize that how dead we are as Human Beings. These epiphanies not just fall in hands of blessed mystics but are a part of our lives too. They come at moments when we least expect them and can be triggered by something as devastating as a disaster or by a harmless or trivial thing as a word spoken to us at one point in time but these epiphanies are capable of changing our lives completely and what comes on the other side of these epiphanies is a different meaning of the same old things and this change is irrevocable.
The movie ’Thappad’ which has a strong feminine overtone is not essentially a movie which aims to show the injustice done to Women but its purpose runs much deeper than that. It is not merely giving voice to Women’s plight but is taking us back to these sudden moments of realization where the same old things appear different without a single object being moved from one place to other. I feel that this life is nothing but a certain perspective or a meaning that we make out of our immediate situations and these epiphanies are but a gate which moves us from one meaning of the world to another.
Vikram slapping Amrita was a small incident in life of Amrita which initiated her epiphany and laid open all her past experiences in front of her eyes, the same experiences lost their old meaning, every old memory crashed down and what seemed a life of beauty earlier was now seen as an ugly world full of unfairness. A single moment made her see herself from the light of a respected and loved daughter-in law to a woman who had no identity of her own, a woman who was loved more for the position she held in the family and not because for who she was. Every neutral comment or incident that she had experienced passively was shining in a light so different where all unfair things lighted up and showed her a world where only Vikram was there, his favorite color, his job, his aspirations and his life. She didn’t leave him for a single slap, she left him because she realized a higher truth that she was never there in the relationship, she was lost and her life was overshadowed by that of Vikram.
The world we are living in today is dripping with misery and suffering with CORONA VIRUS on the horizon, sweeping away lives and creating terror. It can be seen as a bio-weapon or a natural calamity or one can apply any scientific principles to it . I too saw it in the same light when suddenly one day while I was just watching the movie ‘Thappad’, a goose-bump rushed through my skin. The scene where Amrita was hit by Vikram made me see a far-fetched analogy between the ’Slap’ in the movie and the Corona Virus, Both are powerful forces which opened before our eyes, a world which only appears to be beautiful but is soaking with ugliness which can’t be expressed. The epidemic is not very different from that slap which exposed the selfish world of humans and is tearing the picture of so called 'civilized' world where man hates another man and is doing anything to save himself, spreading hatred, showing the evil inherent in him. It is opening before our eyes all the unfair means by which we have exploited our mother planet and most importantly it throws light on the world which was living in denial that ours is a well sustained and techno-friendly world where everything goes by a fixed calculation, a world that took pride in its Intellectualization but had forgotten that life begins where intellectualization ends. We have forgotten that though we have mastered technology but at the end of the day we are just a micro piece of life who can be easily swept away by a virus. The virus is a manifestation of the ugliness that we have created so far.
It is surely an epiphany, yes it will destroy everything that we believed in, it will make us question our faith, it will show us the evil in us, it will destroy every foundation, every old structure but what lies on the other side of this epiphany is a life which is so beautiful, so different from what we have already experienced. Let’s hold our seats and tighten our belts because this transition will liberate us just as the slap liberated AMRITA.
The question that we must focus on is not how all this happened but instead why did it happen at the first place? So, should we float on surface reality like Vikram, explaining the immediate or superficial causes for the eruption of the disease or giving all sorts of scientific thesis or instead we should probe deep into the matter, understanding the consequences of all our past actions, taking this period for deep introspection and transforming our selves by contemplating, understanding the root cause of our behavior as a generation and questioning the principles that once we believed in,