Movies in Mind: Tamasha Will the ‘authentic self’ please stand up?

For Bollywood fans, this movie is, at first blush, a ‘crowd puller’, and for all the usual ‘Bollywood’ reasons: boy-meets-girl story; set in an exotic, ‘foreign’ location (Corsica, France) and peppered (initially) with an array of songs and lyrical dances.

But that’s where the stereotype ends. The story then quickly shifts to beyond the ‘happy ever after’ and onto the reality of the two protagonists returning from their respective holiday fantasies to the mundane middle-class reality of their day-to-day back in India. The focus is first on the girl, Tara, whose curiosity and longing for her former lover, Ved, persists for months and then into years. She resolves to find him, in order to address this lingering void in her consciousness.

Tara deliberately sets up a ‘chance’ encounter at a restaurant and they meet. Ved is refreshingly enthused to see her again, and she feels all the more proud of herself for it. They resume dating. This time, a marriage proposal (by Ved) is proffered as the more serious culmination to their more recent flirtations. But Tara now turns him down. How could this happen?

It is in this twist that the movie simultaneously surprises, discomforts and intrigues its audience. Tara’s initial reasoning is based on what she sees of Ved’s ‘real’ self (parodied by repeated clips of his daily ‘routine’, including shaving, commuting, and presenting at boring boardroom meetings). Yet, she is the one who wisely questions whether indeed this is Ved’s true ‘authentic’ self, given the animated and far more spontaneous persona he had portrayed on their vacation together. His unconvincing retort is that that was actually his ‘false’ self, and it is everyday reality that makes him act his ‘real’ self now. She is astutely unmoved by his rationalizations, and projects his discomfort back onto him. He then (in a predictably masculine fashion) defends against this with his angry overreaction and subsequent walk out.

Therein lie the seeds of Ved’s ensuing existential crisis (Yalom, 1980): be it his unconsciously sabotaging his boss at work, his de novo donation of the engagement ring to a familiar beggar on his commute or his ultimate departure from the corporate world to join the ranks of would-be singers and actors. The ugly truth is that Tara is also a casualty in this seemingly messy reconfiguration.

For Steve Jobs fans, this could also be referred to as Ved’s ‘wilderness years’, characterized by experimentation with a myriad of contradictory emotions, questions, regrets and other musings about the direction and meaning of one’s life (Isaacson, 2011). The movie inevitably resolves these ‘craggy edges’, when Ved finds his new, more authentic path, whereby his true self is permitted the outlets he had so badly stymied during his former corporate ‘worker bee’ days. Using a Jungian lens, the movie alludes well to personas and layers of the ‘self’ that are oftentimes in conflict with one another (Adler and Hull, 1972).

In addition to being a readily digestible celluloid depiction of psychodynamic (Freud, 1992) and existential concepts, and their continued relevance, this movie also nicely critiques existing cultural norms in both contemporary as well as traditional India. This would include its longstanding emphasis on financial security and ‘getting ahead’, but also its recent pivot towards western materialism and all that entails for the pursuit of ‘happiness’.