Kolkata, Feb 5 : Filmmaker Goutam Ghosh says he has explored the widening disparity between what he calls India and Bharat coexisting within the same geographical boundary in his latest film “Shunyo Awnko”.
Prosperity and strife go hand in hand in the country without collision, but that is a veneer only. The tension between the two often erupts into conflicts but these are brutally suppressed by the State.
Ghosh says one can see India in cities dominated by multiplexes, malls and educated middle class, whereas Bharat is peopled by tribals and the deprived caught in a war between the State and so-called ‘adversaries'.
“The red corridor runs through mineral-rich Bharat in eastern India and elsewhere,” Ghosh told PTI. Ghosh says while in National Award-winning “Moner Manush” he had wanted to speak on the issue of religious intolerance, here in “Shunyo Awnko” he presents the story of two seemingly disparate worlds.
“And again in cities where the elite, educated and the subalterns coexist, there lies another gap - a gap between a people who remain unmoved by all your media reports on GDP rise and fall and another who are exercised by them,” the filmmaker said.
“This has been put forth by the character Raka Biswas in the film through whose eyes we here see the situation lying underneath all these talks about economic boom, recession and globalisation. Do these things connote anything to the ordinary man, you will face the same situation if you try to find out,” he says.
Through Raka and mineral MNC CEO Agni Bose's characters he had sought to address the issues of insurgency, infiltration and proxy wars that co-exist.
“I have not taken sides, but we need to have a hard look at ourselves at times. In Shynyo Awnko the two countries stare at each other with hope and despair.”
Asked to elaborate his past comments ‘a man can be destroyed but not defeated' Ghosh says, “I had expanded on the script of Shunyo Awnko after reading these last lines of Hemingway's ‘The Old Man and the Sea' in a flight.
“As the story of Shunyo Awnko approaches the last act or the Zero Act, all of us realise that any triumph can never be final. Man is not made for defeat.”
Besides Konkona Sen Sharma (journalist) and Priyanshu Chatterjee (businessman), the film stars thespian Soumitra Chatterjee (scientist), veteran Lolita Chatterjee in a comeback role and debutantes Priyanka Bose and Arijit Dutta.
