Kaisi Hai Yeh Rut—Dil Chahta Hai

I know I should not post this piecemeal but I have this thing that I have to post something every week, otherwise I will stop writing my blog. So, here, is another extract on the song Kaisi Hai Yeh Rut.

Kaisi Hai Yeh Rut begins with Tara coming out from her room dressed in a white saree and the sound of water gushing in the background. Sid, enthralled by Tara’s ethereal beauty, begins to paint her portrait. While painting, he takes us into his dream world. His world has a brighter aura as compared to reality and at times, it feels blurry. The blurriness, which appears to be intentional, denotes that this is Sid’s dream. The song Dil Gira Dafatan in Delhi 6 also used this technique, where Roshan (Abhishek Bachchan) goes into a state of trance; he imagines the chaos of Chandni Chowk in Times Square. The waviness of the screen denoted that it was unreal. 

Sid’s dream world is a utopian land, where he has only nature for company. There are no other people. This is his bubble, symbolised by his walking among the bubbles, where he seeks refuge from reality. Sid loves to be close to nature. In his room, there are numerous ducks kept near his painting canvas. His room has a giant glass prism, which maybe reminds him of the rainbow as a prism disperses a stream of white light into seven colors of the rainbow. His love for nature is manifested more clearly in his dream world. He paints by the flowing river. He hears the chirping of the birds. He is enchanted by the fluttering butterfly. He is allured to the touch of the flowers, and the grass. There are resplendent rainbows in the bright sunlight. There are ecstatic dolphins in the gleaming moonlight. There are glittering yellow days, and shiny purple nights. Sid is floating on a crescent moon, and that moon reverses and merges into Tara’s head. It was as if Sid is the moon to his Tara, the star. At one point, a breaking star, a tootata tara, rushes by, as if again referring to Tara, who is also broken in many ways. In the dream, Sid is dressed in white, the same color as that of Tara’s saree—the white color not only representing similarity with the white of the moon and the star but also Sid’s pure and inchoate love for her. 

The song also demonstrated Sid’s views on love. Sid says, “Dekho yeh jo nadi hai, milne chali hai saagar hi ko, yeh pyaar ka hi saara hai caravan.” Love is a caravan. It is similar to the meandering journey of the river from its beginning to meet the sea. This is again seen the way Sid helps Tara in her journey, from the day she came in his life with her baggage in a truck to the day she left this world, and all her baggage was taken away in the same truck. Sid stood by her till she met her sea of death, which might be the reason of the song beginning and ending with the sound of water. 

Sid, then, sings, “Isme bandhan nahi hai, aur na koi bhi deewar hai.” Neither are there any limitations nor are there any barriers in love. In his ideal world, he can love anyone, but in the real world, he is bound by the suffocating rules of the society. He falls in love with Tara but cannot express it freely because no one would understand his feelings. “Kaise kisi ko bataaye, kaise yeh samjhaaye kya pyaar hai.” He finds it difficult to explain to others what is love. It is an unexplained relationship. He is hesitant to even let Tara know that he loves her. All he can do is express his love for Tara by making his most beautiful and his most favorite painting ever, which he also gifted to her and she put it in her room. Like the way Varun expressed his love for Pakhi by making a ‘masterpiece’ in Lootera. In a way, this inability to describe love, confirmed that Tara also loved Sid because in her final moments, she says, “Kuch rishtey hote hai jinka koi naam nahi hota.” Even she cannot describe the relationship that she has with Sid, and the feelings that she has for him. The real world they stayed in would not have let her express it, but in her final moments, it was her acknowledgment that she, too, loved him.