UDAAN

In the gloomy evenings that we spent hanging around the neighbourhood pulia worrying over our JEE exams in that do-or-die summer of 1993, I remember some of my less privileged bihari friends asking me why I was not trying to get into TISCO as an apprentice. I’d scored well in my 10th standard exams. I was supposed to do reasonably well in my 12th too. They told me that if I appeared for the annual apprentice exam that TISCO held every year- I could get in as an apprentice and be set for life. Of course, I’d have to slog my butt off in the first few years-but then I’d be a permanent employee by the time others were finishng college. Wasn’t that good for me?

I was surprised when I heard that. It was something that my parents had never thought of and that struck me as weird. It was weird because each of my (very few ) career options had already been spelt out and ground grimly into my thick skull by my parents on so many occasions-I didn’t think there could be other career options beyond them. I coould either become an Engineer or I could become an engineer. That was it. How was a small town boy who’d never been out of the city alone to blame? I myself had never had a chance of trying to discover what it was that I wanted to become in life. That was 1993.

Now, eighteen years later, when I sit down to watch a small indie film that’s set in JSR after a jog through a light evening drizzle, I find myself swamped by everything that I thought I’d left behind. That is the power of cinematic expresssion of this most basic, unadorned yet tenderly told tale.

In Udaan, I find a promising young director from Mumbai (who’s never been to JSR before) reminding me how some things never change-no matter how much they appear to. What young Vikramaditya Motwane manages to achieve with Udaan is siginficant in the quietest of ways-just like its shy and confused 17 year old protaganist who finds himself getting trapped into a life that he most certainly doesn’t fit into and is dying to run away from.

Udaan is a small coming-of-age film-yes; but its been put together with such honesty of purpose and conviction in its voice that -it makes its surprise shortlisting at this year’s Canne’s Film Fest feels almost obvious in retrospect. Just the fact that the film’s set in JSR makes it a must watch for anyone from the steel city.( The director gets the local lingo+ ethos bang-on right and the parts of the city that are covered look seeped with old-world-colonial-charm ) For everyone else, Udaan still worth a definite dekho as proof of what can be achieved within the framework of a small time-frame, a non star cast, modest physical setting and apparently mundane middle class concerns about the values/concerns that dictate small town urban life.

Rajat Barmecha stars as the poetic protaganist who gets packed off from his boarding school for repeated misdemeanours and is then taken to task by his strangely insular and sadistic father(Ronit Roy) who runs his house like Hitler in the early forties. Ronit Roy wants his teethering son to straighten up, join an engineering college and work in the steel factory but young Rajat would rather take his chances in trying to make a career out of writing. This obvious autobiographical motive forms the pivot around which Motwane spins his very 400 Blowish tale. While the tension between the father and his long estranged son is played out around familiar issues of unrequited love and misunderstandings, the film still manages to make an impact because of the impeccable scene constructs, great dialogues+poetry and uniformly good acting by the entire cast-including a six year old (Aayan Boradia) who has to be the best child actor to grace in the indian screen since Jugal Hansraj in Masoom(1983).

There’s so much of unspoken angst and unexploitative true-to-life aches/pains of growing up in Udaan, writing about the film seems to alternate between redundancy and holding up a cracked, dusty mirror that leads you back to a tree lined road somewhere far behind. Sure the mirror’s small and modest, but if you wipe it clean from edge to edge-you can see your whole life wound up inside the road that links Kadma to Sonari.