Udaan to Infinity and Beyond

Udaan is touching chords of nostalgia of growing up amongst adults and charming the young with hope in the eyes. The undecisive youth wants time and emotional support to pursue his/her dream career. Udaan is going to be more than teenage success in coming years, a benchmark for coming of the age film. Udaan is going to be our own The Catcher in the Rye, an expression for the teen angst.

Udaan was selected in the competitive section in the prestigious Cannes film festival. And the mainstream media and bollywood reaction: silence. Unforgivable! Such efforts need encouragement in an early stages so that Udaan could have good outreach to global audience. Mainstream media and bollywood fails us in great way. Now, when Amitabh Bachan likes the movie, everybody is hailing it as masterpiece. Udaan is a cinema based on real life and that has touched us in our lives. And people must watch it as its the voice and angst of mature teenager. I find ~uh~™ 's review enchanting and rational to support my view :

At 17, most people don’t know what they want to do with their lives. At 35, most people realize that they should have done something which they loved to do at 17. The rest, just a handful, takes a path of their choice. Udaan is about realizing that choice in life. Though, Udaan is definitely not one of those ‘protagonist is a winner’ tales, but just a hint of the force to win. As they say, an end is always the beginning of something.

Many people raise this question, ‘why should we watch a movie like Udaan and waste our quota for weekend entertainment, which doesn’t solve any problem, but just shows what we already know?’ or ‘ The story did not end properly’. Well, Cinema is a medium of expression by which a writer/ director expresses his feeling, makes a statement and leaves it to the interpretation, acceptance or rejection to the audience. The more real the story is , the difficult is to end it. Is there any ‘ending’ to real life stories ? As Satyajit Ray said – Cinemas of the world were not meant to change a society. The audience is. But Cinema has created sensible audience. What a cinema like Udaan probably does, it uses the language of cinema to educate and inspire many young Rohan’s to take off on the right direction, at the right time.

I don't know about other times. The motivation, self-realisation for energies happens more in company of friends than family these days. Thanks to the Indian family environment that averts risk tendency for more stable and well traveled path. Generally, we often seek jobs for position and prestige, not passion or drive. Our aversion for patronizing good cinema can be well understand by analogy forwarded by Bq on ours attitude towards study of liberal arts : [Source]

"Regarding education in the liberal arts, you have to admit there is a certain class element to those who chose to/are able to pursue serious study in its various fields. For example, someone who is a first generation college student, i.e. first in his/her family to pursue education beyond high school, would much rather choose a ‘safe’ field such as engineering or medicine or aim at clearing the IAS exam, simply because it makes the most economic sense to do so. I would even go so far as to argue that for a country to have a vibrant intellectual environment in the liberal arts, a substantial middle class is pre-requisite; the liberal arts being a more likely choice of perhaps the 2nd or the 3rd generation college student.

I’d imagine something of the sort applies to the US as well if you look at period such as the 60′s, when a new generation not only revolutionized the the popular discourse but also the intellectual one in various disciplines and departments across liberal arts colleges in the US. A generation, I would add, that was considerably better off than the previous one, considering most of them were born in the booming post WWII era. Now whether the second or the third generation born in India post the 1991 reforms demands better avenues for education in the liberal arts remains to be seen."

This movie reaffirms my belief that content is the king. Movies like Udaan are flying high and are capable of taking Indian cinema to infinity and beyond. The perspective of the dreamers are raising and there will always be several flights of 'Hope' in the sky!