How blind does love need to be? (Movie review: Chitrangada)

Never change yourself for anybody, especially after you have fallen in love with each other. I have seen and experienced that immediately after people start seeing each other (or get married), they change. They like to become more ‘loveable’, they try to be things that their partner will like, also expecting that their partner will change for them. This is what they call ‘compromise’ – o you can’t have it your way all the time! And people change in the process. Sometimes, losing themselves. Sometimes, becoming a projection of who their partner wants them to be. I had read somewhere that we never love a person, we fall in love with the image of that person in our mind. And if you keep changing yourself, compromising, doing things that you don’t want to do- you lose your truth, who you are inside; and when you lose touch with yourself, you fall out of love. Unless you love yourself, you cannot accept love from others. The amusing thing, the irony actually, is that when you do change yourself in bits and pieces, ultimately changing yourself completely- the person who had fallen in love with you would not recognize you anymore. And he will fall out of love too.

I recently watched the movie, Chitrangada by Rituparno Ghosh, which triggered a lot of these thoughts. In that movie, Rudra is homosexual (in India homosexuality is a taboo, not accepted by society, considered a loss of dignity if you go against the ‘law of nature’), who decides to get his gender changed in order to feel accepted by the society, to be with his boyfriend, Partho, and rear a child together, coz Partho is fond of kids. Being vulnerably blind-in-love, Rudra decides to go ahead with the procedure, in spite of Partho saying that he loves him just the way he is and doesn’t want him to change anything. But Rudra is blindly in love, right? And he wants to feel the femininity that is bubbling inside him. So he goes against the society, the norms, breaks his parents’ heart (being the only child, only son, parents feel devastated to see their khokhon taking such a bold irreversible step) and listens to his heart, rationalizing his decision. What is love that doesn’t sacrifice? You would do anything, if it makes your relationship stronger, right? Even if it means losing yourself? Well, so what happens after Rudra goes through the initial surgeries? To cut the long story short, Partho leaves him. Partho says that he didn’t want 'Rudie' to change for him. Why did he? Partho also goes on to say that if he wanted to be with a woman, he could go to a real woman, not a synthetic one like Rudra. He in fact, tells him that he is seeing another girl (a common friend of the two!). So after Rudra went all the way to make the relationship work, Partho didn’t just cheat on him, leave him but also changed his sexual orientation?

That my dear friends, is called being blind in love. Don’t try to make something work so much that you lose yourself in the process. You must keep in touch with yourself, instead of being so solely dependent on your ‘significant other’ for completing you. Your partner does not need to complete you, he/she should complement you.

Coming back to the movie, I was absolutely stunned by the performances. All the characters, right from Rituparno Ghosh playing Rudra to Jishu Sengupta playing Partho, to the supporting cast of the parents, the counselor. . .the surge of emotions in everybody’s performance was impeccable. And although, everyone may not relate to the plot literally, the strong emotions of love and compassion are so universal, that you will feel each of the characters and their state of mind. And everything is expressed so metaphorically, which is what makes it so subliminal and beautiful. Every step, every dialogue, every action is symbolic of expressions so much deeper than what they look at the surface.