The Devdas Syndrome by Pritish Nandy

I am told Devdas has opened to the biggest box office collections ever. I am not surprised. As a nation, we have always loved losers. And you cannot get a bigger loser than Devdas. He symbolizes everything that is wrong with us. Defeat and loss have always been noble ideals for us. The more glorious the defeat, the more we exalt in it. For we believe that losers are the salt of the earth, winners are cheats. That is why successful people are admired but seldom respected. We are programmed to believe that success always comes along with a certain amorality. That winners are people who smartly sidestep the law.

Now, after so many years, we are slowly figuring out that it was the laws that were actually wrong. Whether it was FERA or MISA or COFEPOSA, these laws were made by a bunch of cunning, manipulative, self-seeking politicians who believed that by enacting such draconian laws they could terrorize people and make a lot of money on the side. It was like a jazia tax on success. Meanwhile, the losers have taken it all. They are the glory boys of our literature and public life. They are the heroes. They have reinforced our age-old belief that it is more noble, more heroic to walk away from success than to embrace it. While Americans celebrate the journey from the log cabin to the White House, we admire the exact opposite. We respect Siddhartha for giving up his kingdom to become the Buddha. We admire Ashoka who won the battle of Kalinga only to become a bhikshu; Mirabai, who walked out of the palace to become a minstrel. Our father of the nation is Gandhi who gave up his successful career as a barrister to become what the colonizers saw as a 'half-naked fakir'. Even Subhas Chandra Bose's iconic stature comes from the fact that he kept losing. He lost out to Gandhi's machinations when he stood for the Congress presidentship. His Azad Hind Fauj was a non-starter. All he stood for finally was a string of heroic failures. That is why we revere him so much.

Possibly, that is why Devdas has always touched our hearts. Generations of Indians have empathized with him as he drowned himself in whisky and self-pity. It is the most maudlin story of our time, and the most sickening. By adding spectacle to this noxious imagery, director Sanjay Leela Bhansali has actually enhanced its mystique and made it that much more contemporary and relevant to our times. But Devdas is not Forrest Gump. Nor is he the AIDS-stricken Andrew Beckett whose character Tom Hanks essayed so sensitively in Philadelphia. Devdas refuses to rise above his sick and sodden self-image. In fact, he wallows in it and his death is a supreme act of completely meaningless sacrifice. An escape, as it were, from the sheer trauma of coping with life.

By enshrining the story of this eternal loser and packaging it so lovingly and is leadingly as the story of the eternal lover, Bhansali ends up romanticizing Devdas. He adds scale, magic and spectacle to what was seen, till now, as a very simple and austere tale of loss and loneliness. P.C. Barua, K L Saigal and Dilip Kumar stuck to that original paradigm. But Shah Rukh Khan, whose own life epitomizes the precise opposite-the Raju who became a gentleman - tries his best to be convincing as a drunken sod in the new, improved version where everything is so much larger than life. The last scene, where Devdas lies dying, smothered by red petals, as the huge gates of the zamindar mansion close in on his beloved Paro, trapped in a marriage where she gets neither love nor sex, only a hopelessly rich husband and children too old to call her mother, is the ultimate tribute to the bleakness of life.

In fact, it is not just Devdas. All the three are losers. Paro loses the one man she ever loved and remains trapped like a restless ghoul in this huge mansion with a loveless husband and those grown-up children she never gave birth to. The fact that the mansion is so stunningly beautiful, with huge stained glass doors and spectacular mosaic floors, makes her tragedy that much more visually dramatic. Chandramukhi, on the other hand, remains a victim of her calling. The whore with the golden heart that every novelist, every screenplay writer, dreams of. Whether it is Sarat Chandra or J F Lawton, who scripted Pretty Woman, the imagery is the same. A woman who sells her body every night but saves her soul for eternal love. An ageing Madhuri Dixit, by just being Madhuri Dixit, gives the role that much more poignancy. Just as Aishwarya Rai plays Paro to the hilt, with her moist eyes and drop dead porcelain prettiness. You want to protect her, love her, hold her back as she runs down this one-way street to hopelessness.

Did I like the movie? Does it really matter? The truth is I had far more fun the next evening, watching on ESPN two extremely gifted young cricketers - Mohammed Kaif and Zaheer Khan - steer India to a spectacular victory over England in the Nat West Series. As thousands of fans went ballistic at Lord's, I realized how important victory can be. In bringing together and bonding people. All those who talk about how important it is to be Hindu to rediscover our self-esteem must have been taken aback to find two young Muslim boys redeeming our honor as a cricketing nation. That is exactly what victory does. It erases irrelevancies. It does not matter who actually scored the runs - Hindus or Muslims, Brahmins or lower castes. What matters is that India won. Success beats back prejudice, hate, all the nastiness that politics unleashes. That is why, for me, a Mohammed Kaif is that much more important than a Devdas. For when we win, we rise above our differences. When we lose, we destroy everything and everyone around us. Like Devdas.