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Main Vaapas Aaunga is the movie India needs but doesn’t want

Veer Zara in many ways feels like the spiritual predecessor to Main Vaapis Aunga. Both films insist on the same idea that has now become strangely controversial: human connections matter more than political borders.

The first time I watched the trailer of Imtiaz Ali’s latest film, Main Vaapas Aaunga, I knew it was going to be a heavy watch. I even carried tissues with me to the theatre. I had learned my lesson when I went to watch Highway in 2014. And boy, oh, boy was I right. Ali’s Partition drama is hauntingly beautiful. It is disheartening to see its abysmal box office performance. Main Vaapas Aaunga deserves better. It deserves our undivided attention. Not every good film deserves commercial success, but films like this are becoming increasingly rare. At a time when stories are expected to reaffirm our beliefs, identify heroes and villains, and leave us with a sense of a moral high ground and nationalist fervour, there is something very radical about Main Vaapas Aaunga. In a cinematic landscape where filmmakers are increasingly obsessed with drawing memories to create borders, Ali’s tender ode creates a bridge.

And perhaps, that is why it is the movie India needs but doesn’t want.

The movie has the usual Imtiaz Ali quirks: going back and forth in unfamiliar and fractured timelines, memories disrupting the present, the past becoming your haven and you, its hostage. But unlike his previous films, where love and longing eventually salvage the emotional catastrophe Ali makes the viewer live through, here we land at the deepest wounds of the subcontinent’s history—the........

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