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A life less ordinary
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Rihla shows that there is space for alternative narratives
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Family time Vasanthi (Sonali Kulkarni) with her children in Rihla
It is a happy journey of Brinda, Suja, Shabbir and Saidalu as they hop, skip their way to the graveyard where Brinda wants to lay flowers on the tombstone of her father so that he doesn’t become a shaitan. The sunshine disappears as the graveyard becomes eerily dark as smog envelopes the place and a bearded mendicant directs them to a banyan tree whose aerial roots and branches cast long shadows and trigger the primeval fear among the children who start scampering, except for Brinda (Kundana). Why doesn’t she start running? That why happens to be the crux of the poignant and touching story of a school girl with learning disability.
One thing comes across clearly from Rihla (the journey) produced by Gita Karan (principal of Geetanjali School) and directed by Ajit Naag is that there is space for alternative story telling unformated by a formula that is common to mainstream cinema. There are ingredients from the mainstream cinema, or perhaps real life: the lecherous boss, the glad-eyed balding sidekick, the lecherous autodriver the shame of a normal child having a differently-abled sibling, but beyond all this the unformulaic story telling is heart warming. The backgrounder of how Brinda ended up being as what she is delivered in one frame where a doctor talks about the sense of loss after the death of her father and also a bout of encephalitis. Her younger sibling Tabu shows both the angst and concern that accompanies having a sister who is difficult to deal with.
Sonali Kulkarni gives an understated performance as the lone woman bringing up children and battling all odds after the demise of her husband.
What clicks in the story is the very ordinariness and a narrative that’s grounded in Hyderabadi lingo and a story that’s very easy to empathise with and become part of. There are conflicts at every point in the story, right from sharing and metaphorically breaking the toys to drinking water to falling in love, but they are resolved without a fuss with humour or with a few tears. Minus the star value that Aamir Khan has and the slick production that he brought to Taare Zameen Par, Rihla manages to cross it documentary ordinariness and turn into a cinema with a heart-warming story.
SERISH NANISETTI
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