Crashing into each other


Crashing into each other

We saw the movie Crash this weekend, and I must admit it is a mind blowing movie. It kind of catches you by the caller and shakes you up. The multi starrer cast has Don Cheadle, Brendan Frazer, Sandra Bullock, Matt Dillon to name a few .There were quite a few star performances from the other casts, but I am not here to write a fim review so will move on. What shook me really hard is that the world we are living in is so flimsy, so sensitive, so fragile! It is exactly like a water bubble, so beautiful yet you never know when it is going to burst. What the movie glaringly told the audience is today's world is so very divisive and there are so many identities one can associate with. It is easy to to deduce that movie talks about racism in the richest, and the most powerful country in the world - the United States of America, but no, if you simply hold on , take a deep breath and think - the subtle underlying messages in the film are all pervasive. Suddenly you feel yourself identifying yourself with it and it starts to look and sound scary. The modern society is begot with problems, tensions, strife and stress. Sometimes these negativities overflow their container and changes our whole persona ! In our maddening rage and worry we forget to reason , we forget to treat the other human being with respect , we forget love and compassion, infact we become so concerned about our cacoons of safety that we do not mind killing the other person. The movie very deftly showed a suffering policeman (suffering due to his father's illness) molesting a black woman, almost like second nature. Was the cop a bad guy,ofcourse he was! But a few scenes down, the same shameless worthless cop rescues the same very black woman from a car accident spot, risking his own life. This scene absolutely left me speechless and stunned. The bad cop was not truly a bad human being, given the chance he is willing to go to any extent to perform his duty. He was a villain in one scene and a hero in another! It suddenly clicked to me , arent we all like that , sometime an angel sometime a fallen guy. Yet we pass judgment at others so effortlessly- he is so good or he is so bad without giving the slightest consideration to the situation in question. I am reminded of what Sri Sri Ravi Shankar keeps saying to us - we are all very good , very nice , loving species by birth, what makes us cruel or crooked is only very superficial , something that we gather in our way - stress. It is our stress and internal conflicts which make us ugly and beastly , we do not get it from our parents. There can not be a bigger testimony to that thought than this movie. The other scene that I liked very much was when the Iraqi shopkeeper enraged over the burglary of his shop tries to kill the Mexican who replaced the lock of his shop. In a flash of seconds, the mexican's lil daughter comes out of house and comes in the way between the 2 men and just then, the bullet is fired. The mother and the father are left gasping and crying, while the old Iraqi is standing dumbfounded. He wanted to punish the mexican but not his 5 year old daughter. In a flash he realised what a terrible sin and crime he has committed and his facial expression of rage changes to that of extreme guilt. I would carry that expression a long time in my mind. How many times we as modern human beings have ventured out to set the wrong right, to salvage our pride, to punish the wrong doer but invaribly ended doing another wrong. We are so blinded by our own sense of righteousness that we do not know where precisely to stop. The old Iraqi however got a lease of life as the bullet turned out to be a blank. How I wish sometimes the pain that we cause to others unintentionally turn out to be blank as well! But well our old man was lucky, not simply because cops did not take him away , but because he rediscovered his humaneness with the help of the lil girl, so much so that he called her a guiding angel. Now thats what I would call a story, something so very unpredictable and yet so profound in its teachings.

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