Banaras - Do you believe in mysticism?

Banaras (@PVR Hyderabad on 09th April) infuses life and meaning as it takes us right into the heart of the holy city Varanasi – the temples, River Banks, they make a splendid occasion for sights and sounds seldom heard in contemporary cinema. The movie creates a world of optical and spiritual salvation! This quest of fusing spirituality with romances does run into road-blocks at times, but then things, upon retrospect, start to make sense in the larger scheme of things.

Urmila displays a (already proven) penchant to get under the skin of the character.
Dimple startles, in her moment of reckoning with her screen daughter when the older woman must confess to a crime so terrible, it makes Lady Macbeth appear akin to Mother Teresa. Aakash Khurana as the psychiatrist, experiencing the mysticism of Varanasi, brings to light a character trying to downsize the very thing he came from and will fade into.

L C Singh, a professor of mysticism & existentialism at the BHU and a visiting faculty at Harvard, has penned down a script with such reverence to the penultimate question in everybody’s life… The question of existence and purpose…

The explanation of life/existence/Moksha has been dealt with singular tenacity and sensitivity. Perspectives of Science (Quantum Physics) and Spirituality have been revealed wonderfully in almost the same interlude. Reality and existence are questioned and left unanswered for the audience to ponder upon… The simple nature of truth (“Jo Saral Hai, Wohi Sach Hai”) feels astonishingly true as the film comes closer to the 2.5 hour mark.

By the end, I was unable to realize what had hit me. The hunger to understand existence/death/moksha has resurfaced! Am I living in a confused state of prudence? Why is it so difficult to comprehend the truth, if it is so simple? I had tried questioning the cycle of life and my being, before I was caught up in the vicious fight for survival in this materialistic society. Maybe, this is the time to throw away the bowlines and seek answers…

This well written and well directed movie gave me an opportunity to experience something that we rarely, if ever, do at the cinemas! Quite frankly, I do not know if the subject will work in today’s time; but it has the power to transform. I might have to keep watching it to unravel the layers there are to it. 95% people born in India are believers, and Banaras is for them!


Trivia:
Soham is the name of the protagonist in the movie, played by Ashmit Patel.
I realized that Soham is a Sanskrit word which means I am Him (Him referring to the omniscient Almighty)! All the living beings on this earth are said to be producing this sound of So and Ham while inhalation and the exhalation. The word thus claims that all living beings re-proclaim the fact every moment that they are God. It is said by the Hindu saints and gurus, that one can attain moksha, or mukti or Liberation, from the cycle of life and death by concentrating on the breath and mentally saying the word "so" when you inhale and the word "ham" (pronounced hum) when you exhale. By doing so, all evil is destroyed and one is believed to reach the position of ultimate power and a position equivalent to Gurus and Gods as per Hinduism.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soham_(Sanskrit)