I recently watched this Marathi movie Nat-Samrat and was deeply moved by the rich experience the movie offered. The characters, particularly the protagonist Nana Patekar, have performed with such intensity, that you feel as if you have your own skin in the game. The movie left a lot of questions in my head. Also a few conclusions, rather distasteful ones.
Life is suffering
Buddha was bang-on when he concluded this, 2000 years back. The world has not changed one bit since then. Life continues to be suffering. If not for all, then for most. Rather for all, but in different degrees. Everybody is caught in some or the other mess – be it about health, wealth or relationships. Most mess is around relationships. Just the way we see in Nat-Samrat.
Until my early twenties, I found this statement of Buddha rather pessimistic. In my thirties, I find it realistic. Most new-age gurus of joy teach otherwise. After all, ‘Life is Joy’ makes for a good marketing proposition, a great bait to hook the suffering lot. Then there is a bunch of spiritualists who say life is joy. Yes, a few of them have really found joy but most use it so that they can refrain from acknowledging how a big part of life, their own life is suffering. Under the garb of artificial joy, their deeper misery stays stifled. A lot of positive thinkers belong to this domain.
We should learn to acknowledge how dragging ourselves out of bed is suffering, how driving in a noisy city is suffering, how office or domestic politics is suffering, how having to adjust or inability to adjust with others is suffering, how the desperate chase for targets or sustainability of a job or business is suffering, how passion of young age leads to suffering and the dependency of infancy or old age too is suffering. Once we acknowledge suffering, something can be done about it. Not always but sometimes.
Family is the chief source of suffering
A man being a social animal needs people to relate to, people to love and protect, people to seek love and protection from. In the process, we get into relationships, which while being a pleasure on one hand, are a source of entanglement on another. Born in a family, either we are biologically bound to relationships by default or the said social impulses in us cause us to bind ourselves into committed relationships thus forming a family.
Families undoubtedly provide a certain level of warmth. However rather than being pure sources of comfort, they simultaneously become sources of pain, big time sources at that. Parents are busy imposing their beliefs on innocent kids, teenagers are busy ignoring, rebelling or taking the parents for granted. In-laws and daughter-in-law are often at loggerheads with each other. Couples have their own difficult dynamics with unpleasant fall outs. When close relationships cause misery as is so aptly depicted in the movie, the institution of family itself becomes questionable.
Just like in the movie, so in life, friendships have retained some sanctity but that’s possibly only because in friendship you see only limited facets of the other person. Living with somebody (with lots at stake) for years together is one thing and meeting somebody during your carefree hours or on an easy holiday is another.
It’s worth investigating how families happen to be such complex arrangements. Each of us is imperfect. We have limitations that die hard. Maybe they aren’t limitations in the first place. They just appear like limitations; they actually are dimensions of our personality.
In a family, each of us brings in some strengths and warmth of togetherness to the table. However, through our various limitations, we also bring in triggers that press another’s buttons. Human nature is such that the strengths are soon forgotten but the limitations pinch and they pinch hard. We are wired that way. Our limitations make life difficult for others, their limitations make life difficult for us. And many limitations are here for a long haul. So automatically the misery is in for a long haul as well.
Even with all the love, empathy and compassion that one can gather; one cannot beat the pain that others limitation can cause. Jesus could shout from the rooftop to love your neighbor as yourself, but it just wouldn’t work out to be in love with that person and enjoy his company. At the most you can maintain peace and harmony with him, make do with whatever unpleasantness he is bringing and yet wish him well.
Our self-preservation instinct is too strong. We do have tremendous goodness and nobility in us and wish to selflessly make life beautiful for others but when we feel that our non-negotiable interests are being compromised because of the other person and his limitations, we naturally choose to take our own side even if it comes at the cost of another’s misery. So we are wired in a way that selfishness eventually trumps over selflessness.
A man is alone in his suffering
A man is alone in the suffering. He has to bear his cross all by himself. I have felt this earlier in my life during my own tragic travails. For years, I was in huge emotional turbulence and the people around me were doing their best to help me. But nobody could. In spite of their best efforts.
That’s when I realized that no other person can do much about your misery. They generally suggest solutions (most of which don’t happen to work) and naturally move on to have their good night’s sleep, even if you are going to be busy tossing around in bed, writhing in agony. In the movie too, Nana and his wife could give solace to each other , but none could stop the other from suffering.
Suffering is here to stay until the last moment
Nana Patekar and Vikram Gokhale suffer their plight until the last moment of their lives. Rather it just got worse until they gave in, once and for all. This is the common fate of most people and death becomes a cop-out. Ideally we should organize our lives in a way that old age becomes gold age and we can look forward to it. But in reality, it only gets worse as we grow. There are some advantages with old age and it does bring in a certain freedom and gaiety of spirit but it is not without suffering for sure, physical and emotional.
Some people escape this trap and die like satisfied souls with lesser agony but for most of humanity , suffering is here to stay all life, no matter how much you try to change life and circumstances. Challenges are like that set of frogs we endeavor to weigh. By the time you try to bring in the second frog to the weighing scale, the first one escapes. Resolving challenge means creating space for a fresh, perhaps bigger challenge to come. Suffering is here to stay.
Having said all these pessimistic stuff, one fact nevertheless remains – that we can take our life circumstances in the right perspective and ease our suffering. There seems to be a certain level of degree of control in our hands; at least some people are blessed with this degree of control and also blessed with Gurus or mentors who can help them exercise this degree of control. But as long as not every one has the inclination and the wherewithal to turn their lives around, in every age and time, a certain portion of humanity seems doomed to suffer.
The movie has done a great job in depicting this sorry state of affairs. It helps us see life as it is and not as how one wants it to be. There is something about Marathi cinema that Hindi cinema lacks. It roots you in reality rather than removing you from the same.
