Finally, it’s happening.
This is the year that India is finally owning up to its debilitating trend of child and minor sexual abuse, its escalating crimes against women and children and dealing with predators, both in and out of doors, in mainstream Hindi cinema. And yet, there are enough differences in the treatment of these issue in the two films to merit a comparison.
It is a rare film that makes your hair stand on end for an entire hour and half, and not entirely due to a certain kind of pervasive violence in its atmosphere. Not for a second could I tear my eyes off the screen, and proceeded to forthwith berate the extremely talkative couple sitting next to me for obscuring half the dialogues with their persistent puppy love and pummelling. Ah, how quick are we to forget our tender selves and leave behind the innocent joy of groping hands and loud whispers in the darkened halls! The subconscious truth, perhaps, was the fact that the person happily munching away snacks and snaking fingers with their partner a decade back and the thirty two year old mother-of-a-girl-child that I am now, are half lives apart from each other. As a mother of a female child, who is a mere year and half of age, I was cringing with fear the entire time, since I could feel, with the first few minutes of the film, that the story being told was all too real.
