No Smoking

(This post contains spoilers - a lot of them. Not that it should matter when you decide to watch the movie!)

"To be is to do"--Socrates.

"To do is to be"--Plato.

"Do be do be do"--Frank Sinatra

thus the movie began. And it had me enthralled from then and there! Two people had recommended it, which is my usual criterion for watching a movie. I was warned of the movie being a ‘mind-warp’ and was expecting a ‘Lost Highway’-ish style of David Lynch and so it turned out to be. It has every element to transform it into the next cult classic coming from Bollywood. The movie did make me go philosophical with the question – what the fuck?!! And so I did what I usually do after watching such movies – search the web for the answer(s) to my question.

The web, however, proved to be a disappointment. There were lesser posts about the movie per se than the Anurag Kashyap love hate war which included, among others, Anurag himself and some prominent critics in Bollywood. Khalid Mohammed’s review (??), in particular, was pure spite and entirely a tirade against the director, with little being said about the movie itself.

As the director himself admits, the movie is about arrogance. It depicts a clash between the arrogance of a narcissist on one hand and the arrogance of a society on the other. I would take it a step further and say that the movie underlines the arrogance of the director himself. It is by a director who doesn’t want to conform to rules, someone who loves his own work like a child, doesn’t care to churn out a run-of-the-mill masaaledaar Om Shanti Om. If not for anything else, Anurag needs to be applauded for that.

After watching it, the movie does fill you with questions. It seems to be replete with visual metaphors. What does ‘Hitler ki aulaad’ signify? The carpets shop? The eunuch giving him the coins? His two cut fingers? His wife and secretary looking the same? The bath-tub? Siberia?

There will be, as is with such movies, multiple answers and interpretations and not a single unified theory that can explain everything. Trying to understand the movie becomes as interesting as trying to decipher an interesting dream. However, we are not content by just dismissing it as just another dream, but are intent on trying to find a meaning, to fit the missing pieces in the puzzle and to discover the layers of reality underneath.

My interpretation –

K is having nightmares and going through a traumatic experience as he is being forced to quit smoking, something he does passionately. He tries to cope with his freedom being snatched from him and it is all a harrowing experience for him. He has forced himself to imagine extreme consequences to make him quit smoking and they continually haunt him in his nightmares. He tries to escape and goes to his Siberian dreams but is not able to escape entirely as his dreams turn to nightmares. Unable to cope with reality he returns to his nightmares and digs into it in search of an answer.

His wife and his secretary, albeit the same person, (‘I’m your wife. I’m your secretary. Remember, tum nahi chahte the office mein kisi ko pata chale.’) depict different personas – one who is intent on making him stop smoking and thus, curb his freedom and the other who is not bothered by his smoking. But he is bent on seeing them as two different people. He sees it all as a conspiracy – the people who convinced him to quit smoking appear in his nightmares as members of a well-knit conspiracy.

His cut fingers signify his loss of freedom in another level. It shows how he is compelled to quit smoking. I further thought he could have actually lost his fingers and that could be the reason he is not able to smoke. But I’m not sure of this explanation myself.

His friend Abbas (who regained his fingers after referring K to the baba) and his doctor friend represent people who were forced to conform to societal norms, people who were forgiven their sins after ‘helping’ someone else. The movie in the end, shows the complete assimilation of K into the society when he, for want of redemption, tries to bring in another of his friend to follow his suit. At this point, the dividing line between retribution and redemption becomes blurry and curved – beyond recognition.

The baba is an epitome of the society, which in itself is much more arrogant than any arrogant person. The baba wants people to conform to his rules. His mistakes will be forgiven, he can’t be blamed. At the same time, he will be relentless when it comes to mistakes committed by individuals. If a person has committed a crime, a sin, he has to pay for it. The baba is unforgiving.

Hitler is one name for human arrogance and that’s why he repeatedly refers to the baba as Hitler ki aulaad (Baba: “Guru manta hun main usko”)

Siberia epitomizes his loss of freedom – the curfew and his inability to find cigarettes to smoke. It is a fear that he harbors constantly. Further, the bathtub in the snow connects his nightmares to reality. It is the place where he drops into ruminations and where his fears come alive as nightmares, and finally brings him back to reality.

P.S. Get the script of the movie here.