Sudhir Mishra’s Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi opens with the actual footage of Nehru’s legendary speech “tryst with destiny” and its accompanying vision – ‘At the stroke of the midnight, when the whole world has slept, we wake up into prosperity and freedom.’
Wait! Here, Sudhir explains how Nehru has made a mistake in his sentence, because at midnight, when India woke to freedom and prosperity, people in New York were wide awake. It was around two thirty in the afternoon in New York.
Sudhir Mishra’s Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi begins, declaring (though not decrying) the so-called Nehruvian dream as a nightmare. The first thought that struck you after watching the film is – why I hadn’t watched this yet? Honestly!
“Yesterday’s radical is today’s norm”. Sudhir Mishra’s Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi critiques the eternal debate between the Indian Left’s romanticism of its “cause” and its ability to propagate “change”. Yet this is also where the Indian left – in the film and also in the real life – fails.
Today, the film emerges as a whole new reference point. With the economy reverting slowly to the 1970s, and the rise of a centralized authoritarian power system, the resurgence of student protests and street fights suggest history is repeating itself.
Set against the backdrop of the Emergency (1960s-1970s), Sudhir Mishra’s Hazaaron Khwahshein Aisi follows Marxist Siddharth (son of a Muslim father and a Hindu Bengali mother) who has renounced a cushy life to follow what he calls the muddy road to “end the vulgarity of oppression,” over a course of events that force him to acknowledge the futility of a revolution and ultimately abandon the rigged and helpless fight against the state.
Siddharth’s hypocrisy in running away to a life of comfort in London as soon as his defeat becomes apparent, exposes the hollowness of his sanctimonious sermons about courage and commitment. His “cause” no longer feels sacred, as he realizes the gravity of the state’s power.
Being born to an influential father helps protagonist Siddharth escape in the end, although it’s a luxury that many of his comrades did not have.
Story Plot
The story is interwoven with the life-stories of three college friends – Siddharth (Kay Kay Menon), Geeta (Chitrangda) and Vikram (Shiney Ahooja), who are drawn into the swirl of contradictions of the time, but later thrown into different directions.
The three friends represent three contesting ideologies but the momentous period of history offered them only two paths – either be in the rat race for ‘success’ which meant building up careers serving the system. Otherwise, listen to the call of history, and lend a voice to the voiceless, which meant going against the system.
Roughly thirty minutes into the film, protagonist Siddharth’s idealism leads him into the remote villages of Bihar. From there, he writes a letter to his friend Geeta. To narrate a moving story of caste dynamics of a village Bhojpur. He tells Geeta, “How Delhi and Bhojpur are not merely separated by a thousand miles but also by five thousand years”.
Geeta, for some good time stands by SIddartha however, in the end, she wavers and backs out. But the cunning Vikram all throughout remains indifferent, and untouched by the prevailing socio-political current.
As the film precedes, Geeta gets married to an IAS officer, and Vikram turns into a high-profile fixer, who can get work done through his political connections while Siddharth the protagonist plunges whole-heartedly into the marxist’s movement.
Ideologically, Siddharth and Vikram were poles apart, though they had a common interest – Geeta. Both of them were in love with the same woman. Geeta, on the other hand, loved Siddharth for all that he stood for (ideologically).
In the present atmosphere of a highly commodified and fractured society that worships de-ideological conformist personalities, Sudhir Mishra’s Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi exemplifies the spirit of self-sacrifice and the political fervor of that era.
It’s amazing how a film made in 2005, nearly 50 years from the time the film was set in, can still explicitly capture the minds of youth even today.
Undoubtedly, the performances of Kay Kay Menon, Shiney Ahuja, and Chitrangda give the plot a sense of vulnerability, realism, and empathy.