First impressions on Rang de Basanti

I saw Rang De Basanti yesterday. After making numerous plans to see it on the big screen with a particular friend of mine which never seemed to materialize, I finally went ahead and saw it in the comfort of my home on a 15” laptop screen.

But I did see it. And it’s good.

While the plot of indifferent modern day youth taking up the torch for a cause is original and makes for compelling viewing, you realize as you power down your laptop that it’s not going to work. A revolution a la Rang de Basanti in India, that is.

For a number of reasons.

Part of the problem is that we’re too indifferent to things around us. And too caught up in surviving in a cut throat world to care about the larger perspective of where the nation is headed.

We see it. And maybe even brace ourselves for the crash. But we do nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.

Maybe because of this escapist notion that we have that the way things are today are not our fault. “Hey, this is what the world was like when I inherited it. Someone else screwed up along the way, not me”.

But that approach doesn’t fix problems. And they don’t go away if you pretend that they aren’t there.

Then there’s the great Indian disinclination towards action. Someone else is always supposed to fix things, not me. My civic duty is just to ensure that the person with the relatively cleaner record gets elected. And it’s so much more comfortable keeping it at that.

Or maybe it’s the overall Indian attitude towards risk. If it ain’t completely broken, why fix it, especially if it involves sticking out my neck.

We’re too cynical. And too disbelieving. And too laidback to start risking ourselves for things we believe in.

But we’re also very wrong about ourselves. And somewhere within all of us there’s a part that wants to fix this mess that we’ve gotten ourselves into.

So maybe it is time that we started taking ourselves seriously.

And realize that the greatest risk is to risk nothing at all.