A Thousand Desires Like These ('Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi') (2003) dir. Sudhir Mishra
“Hazaaron khwaishein aisi ke har khwahish pe dam nikle, Bahut niklay mere arman, lekin phir bhi kam nikle...”
"A thousand desires (within me), such that each one seems worth dying for, Many desires have been fulfilled, yet I yearn for many more..."
Mishra provides an autopsy of a nation caught between radical hope and brutal state repression within post-independent India's failed promises. Set in the early 1970s, just before and during the Emergency, it maps the disillusionment of a generation raised on Nehruvian idealism but crushed by Realpolitk and authoritarian consolidation.
But at its core, the film portrays the collision between dreams and power, threading the personal into the political. Siddharth the revolutionary, Geeta the idealist and Vikram the pragmatist, are all caught within their own desires. Whether longing for liberation, meaning, or connection, they all face systems that are too entrenched, violent or indifferent to move. The title, pulled from Ghalib's couplet, becomes a haunting refrain. Theirs are just the few of the many thousand desires that are left half-formed, half buried.
Chitrangda Singh's Geeta is the film's moral axis and arguably presents the most durable politics. Her desire - for justice, for purpose - is not an extension of her love for Siddharth, as she stays long after he disappears. As a victim of gendered violence, Geeta sees the movement as a responsibility. Instead of fighting for glory, she fights for people, for the rural women she teaches literacy to, and for children - who like her own - deserve better upbringings.
In the end, the film is not about the triumph of any ideology, but rather the cost of dreaming in a broken state. The thousand desires remain, but the state remains untouched, its violence mutating and surviving. The revolution is deterred.
But perhaps there is one ideology that prevails, or at the very least, survives; love.
Brede realized that he had not been living life, but watching his life be lived. Like his own narrator, he would stitch discrete events into the story of his life. This was an instinct and had no benefit. A story demands qualification, invites criticism, splits into paragraphs and chapters. A story fashions expectation as calipers to measure life, scales to weigh incidents as fair or unfair, good or bad. A story asks to be told. A story can be edited. But most dangerously a story creates hope, hope for a happy ending.
you know what i miss in movies. sincerity. authenticity. when scripts didn't spend their time being overtly self aware, lampshading all of their mistakes, and winking at the camera. when they told stories without a sense of spectator before they even hit the screen
All of the deleted/additional Young Mac and Charlie scenes from the Very Sunny Christmas DVD are also now on the Archive in the best available quality :)
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