Karan Johar’s Hasee
Toh Phasee has one of the most vulnerable characters ever etched or
portrayed on Indian screen – Meeta (played by Parineeti Chopra). Meeta’s defencelessness
is tragically and touchingly underlined by her bluster. She does not ask for
pity or sympathy ever – and yet your heart just goes out to her. Irrepressibly
brilliant, punished for her unchanneled and irreverent experimentation, Meeta
is pushed into a corner by social norms ganging up against her intelligent
mind. So she does the socially unacceptable action to keep her going – she
steals from her father.
See Meeta’s context: she needs money for her studies, for a
project. Her overbearing uncle degrades her. Her only hope and emotional
support; her father; tells her to toe-the-line. She is cornered – like a
hounded animal against the proverbial wall. Her need to do her project is as great as that cornered animal’s need to live is. This is a situation
where flight is no longer an option because there is nowhere to run. Fight is
the only option – and that is what Meeta does. And she pays forever.
She can never return home – because she is persona non grata
forever. She has been judged, sentenced and crucified. She is made irrelevant
by her family. Irrelevance is very hard to live with (all those Facebook
regulars who update their status as often as they can and all those
selfie-addicts are in different ways of seeking to feel relevant). Every person needs to feel relevant to at
least one other person in this world. Every person needs a little bit of love
and kindness in their life.
Meeta tries to make it on her own fighting her aloneness by
swallowing a cocktail of anti-depressants. The drugs give her a shield of
bravado and invincibility. When the drugs wear out she is heartbreakingly frail
and unprotected – as evidenced in a number of scenes: when she first makes her
appearance and is unceremoniously offloaded by her sister on her (the sister’s)
would-be; by the boy on a dubious stranger – she just goes from on to another
unquestioningly. That is the drug-induced bravado. When the boy returns to find
her in a disreputable, dirty, insect-infested place lying in a corner in a
foetus-like position; not admitting she has had no food all day – that is fragility
– a fragility born of being irrelevant; of knowing no one really cares. Then
the scenes where she is locked in and ends up wetting borrowed clothes and
helplessly explaining it or when she tries to see her father and cannot because
of a tree in the way and guilelessly stating it – that is vulnerability – a
vulnerability born of being made so unimportant by everyone that you become
just unimportant.
The truth is there is a little bit of Meeta in all of us.
There is some vulnerable part of us that is constantly seeking love and/or
approval. That is hungering for acceptance and longing to be free. No matter
how well adjusted and together a person might seem, Meeta lives in all lives.