Om Dar-Ba-Dar: An Impromptu Review

June 26, 2014 at 9:15 AMJun (Cinema, Musings, Slice Of Life)

OM’s utterance-parts A,U and M represents the waking, dream and the sleep state. Frog, the central image of the film, is a being which lives inside water, outside water and also floats in a partially in and partially out state. The title Om and the image frog stand for coexistence of different kinds and coexistence at different levels.

Parking this aside for a while let me quote Arundati Roy. “India lives in several centuries at the same time. Somehow we manage to progress and regress simultaneously. As a nation we age by pushing outwards and from the middle- adding a few centuries on to either end of our extraordinary CV. We greaten like the maturing head of a hammer-headed shark with eyes looking in diametrically opposite direction.”

Its with the help of these three things: literal meaning of Om, the metaphor of frog nad the quote of A. Roy that I understood Om Dar Ba Dar, when I watched it during my days in the Institute.

I don’t know if my reading is right. But with films like Om Dar Ba Dar, I guess there is nothing like a correct reading and a wrong reading. Like the tadpole, in the film, which refuses to become a frog the film refuses to lend itself to a complete meaning, it appears to me. The second half of the title ‘Dar-Ba-Dar’ meaning ‘From door to door’ to mean itinerary existence also suggests the constant moving/ shifting of the meaning and the expansion of meaning and also digression from meaning.

The film looked, to me, like a microcosm of this country. Like this nation it holds several things- colourful, opposing, meaningful, meaningless, progressive, regressive all within itself. It is a collage like, it is kaleidoscopic. It is jarring and smooth at the same time. It makes meaning only in parts. It makes meaning on partially. It challenges meaning also partially.

Mithya has sansaar, maaya hai sansaar!

[An impromptu reading/ review of the film written in a Facebook group responding to the discussion about the film at the time of its release in January 2014.]