Life is indeed beautiful but then there will always be days when everything will seem to be worth giving up on, those are the day’s films like these will keep you up and want you to keep going, no matter what. Gauri Shinde’s, ’Dear Zindagi’, is an ode to life and accepting it the way it is.
Kiara (Alia Bhatt) struggles to get her sleep pattern right due to her break up and that is when she finds herself at the doorstep of Dr. Jug aka Jehangir Khan (Shah Rukh Khan), a renowned psychiatrist. Dr. Jug gives her lessons on life without ever being preachy, and we realize how badly we all need a Jug in our lives, to tell us it won’t last forever. The beauty of ‘Dear Zindagi’ lies in the fact that it never overdoes things, it handles everything with warmth ironically telling us to tackle life, similarly. The film, at certain points of time, feels like the much-needed therapy for all those deep-rooted traumas and insecurities we hold deep within ourselves, all the walls we have built around ourselves to not let any outside force enter and ruin our lives.
Besides everything else this film is an important milestone in Bollywood that talks about mental health and how much important it is. Psych is an important thing in every human being, it controls every thought that makes or breaks an individual and it is important for us to be able to control it before it starts controlling us. Every person has their own traumas, triggers, and tolerances and for this film, Gauri Shinde gives the fear- of-abandonment issue to the protagonist, an incident that took place long back in time, that still holds its roots so deep in the minds of, not only in the protagonist but most youths out there.
There’s a scene where Kiara breaks down for the first time in front of Jug, and that scene makes ‘Dear Zindagi’ so full of life, Kiara, for the first time shares her trauma with someone, the trauma that has been controlling her actions all her life. We bottle up so much within ourselves just so that we don’t look insane to the world. The taboo that mental health has become often prevents a person from crying, and bottling all of that inside themselves, but how do you laugh with all your heart out if you can’t cry the same? Why not let it out once and for all and never let it back again? It is probably not as easy to get over traumas and fears the way Kiara did, but what’s wrong in hoping, hoping that, you will rise over your fears and find happiness again.
‘Dear Zindagi’ will make you hopeful about life, on your darkest days, when the sunshine fails to reach your doorstep. It will give you a hand when you have fallen into a deep and dark pit and all you have to do is gather the courage to leave your fears behind in that pit and get in touch with your ‘Zindagi, all over again!
Text by: Sreyoshi Sil, IBTN9
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