Grey. Ambiguous. Blurry

I always wondered why Pune wasn't a popular subject of any work of fiction. Be it a movie, a book or a short story. So imagine my surprise when I came across the trailer of a marathi movie called 'Pune 52' - A Noir thriller like never seen before from any Indian Movie. 

Another happy co-incidence being that I live in Pune - area code 52. 

Watching the video on youtube and reading a bit about the movie on their facebook page, made me realise how regional cinema, is slowly and slyly outclassing the commercial hindi film industry. This film also addresses that phase in our country's recent past which is a blur. The success story, the boom and the liberalisation is seen, but the repercussions of that very change on the society is largely undocumented. It's an ambiguous, grey phase between the dark ages of post emergency - pre liberalisation and the technologically fueled and mobile era of the first decade of the new century . The 1990s. 

Every now and again, I wish I was born seven or ten years before I actually was. I wish to be an active part of the change rather than be the receptor of the radical change. I could have changed. I could have brought about change. I could have been the change. 

Since our school text books have failed to acknowledge the post independence era as a part of our contemporary history, it becomes ambiguous. The only traces found are in Pop culture, literature and art. But stifled. Scholarly. Elitist.

I wish they made more movies about the times I was growing up. At the times I was absorbing the change from the mid 1980s to the late 1990s and actively participating in it in the 2000... 

The exponential rate of change has resulted in a collective memory loss of that important phase. The heightened sense of liberalism and self awareness of intellectuals who were hungry for knowledge, for the truth, made our society more open. Free. Tolerant. More interesting to live in.

That very sense of intellectual and creative freedom caved in to a fear of losing control. And today, we are controlled more that we were in that very grey, ambiguous and blurry phase.

Let us remember that time and document it, lest we forget the golden era of that turn we as a nation took, and a where it could have taken us. 

But we took that turn a bit too seriously. A bit to literally. And we have lost our way.