An introduction to the movie

By Samrat Kar

Ship of Theseus is a 2013 Indian drama film written and directed by Anand Gandhi, and produced by actor Sohum Shah. The film explores "questions of identity, justice, beauty, meaning and death through the stories of an experimental photographer, an ailing monk and an enterprising stockbroker”; played by Aida El-Kashef, Neeraj Kabi and Sohum Shah. This movie is scheduled to be released in India on 19th July, 2013.

After three years in development, the film premiered at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival, where it received great critical acclaim, and was touted, “the hidden gem of the year”. It has received largely positive reviews from both Indian and international press and has been hailed as “the most significant film to come out of India in a very long time”.

The title of the film alludes to Theseus’ paradox, most notably recorded in Life of Theseus, wherein the Greek philosopher Plutarch inquires whether a ship that has been restored by replacing all its parts, remains the same ship.

! 1 There are three main protagonist in the movie -

Aaliya Kamal (played by Aida El-Kashef) is a visually impaired and celebrated photographer in the process of undergoing a cornea transplant that will restore her vision. Though the surgery is a success and Aaliya’s vision is restored, she has trouble adjusting to her newfound sense of sight and is dissatisfied with her resulting photography.

! 2 Maitreya (played by Neeraj Kabi), an erudite monk, is part of a petition to ban animal testing in India. When he is diagnosed with liver cirrhosis, his reluctance towards medication is questioned and he must now depend on the people he’s been fighting against - a path he refuses to take.

Neeraj Kabi is a highly respected theatre director and actor. He went into a strict dietary regime to lose 17 Kgs to be able to play the role of the erudite monk Maitreya. He shares "The hunger pangs were intense. Sometimes I couldn't sleep because of the hunger. Sometimes, I was racked by fear - fear that I was damaging my body. I used a lot of breathing and meditation techniques to deal with the hunger pangs. It was a time when I really trained the mind, as there were people around me eating and relishing food all the time. What really kept me going was knowing that this was a once-in-a-lifetime role. This was something very amazing that had come to me as an actor, and that really inspired me. I also read a lot and became so much closer to the character and his philosophy. So much so that in the last week of my diet, I wanted to give up all food intake and just have liquids - because that is what Maitreya did. But, my dietician didn't allow it. She said it would be dangerous for my system". ! 3 A young stockbroker, Navin (played by Sohum Shah), has just had his kidney transplanted. He soon learns of a case of kidney tourism involving an impoverished bricklayer, Shankar. His initial fear is that his new kidney originally belonged to this man. Further investigation proves otherwise, but Navin takes matters into his own hands and confronts the actual recipient in Stockholm.

! 4 At the core, the film assumes a, “physical and philosophical interpretation of the Ship of Theseus paradox.” The ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus's paradox, is a paradox that raises the question of whether an object which has had all its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object. The paradox is most notably recorded by Plutarch in Life of Theseus from the late 1st century. Plutarch asked whether a ship which was restored by replacing all and every of its wooden parts, remained the same ship.

Questions of death, morality and ethics form part of the struggles of each of the three central characters. TimeOut London has called it a “A docu-drama interweaving three stories exploring life in contemporary Mumbai.”

Most of the themes are apparent through the film’s characters: “They shared the central themes of idealism, identity, flexibility and the fallibility of conclusive knowing… At the heart, it is a story that celebrates dichotomy, paradox, duality and irony.”

The film also delves into the nature of relationships – “bound by similarities and challenged by the differences.” Anand Gandhi has been further quoted as saying the characters themselves are, “… manifestations of my artistic, ethical, social and philosophical struggles.” Sight and Vision -

The character Aaliya’s visual disability has been described as being central to the idea of the Theseus paradox, wherein one of her parts has been replaced as it was in the mythical ship. It is this replacement that affects her photography and is recognized as the central conflict of the film.[78] Her regained sight sees her relinquishing her natural intuition.[79] Identity and Change -

The filmmaker has been quoted as saying, “There have been a lot of ideas that have fascinated me for a long time. Ship of Theseus has got a very interesting problem of identity and change. The idea that a human changes through a period of time bring us to the question of identity. We also face the question of responsibility in a constantly shifting, changing scenario. The film is a series of interesting problems," Personal Beliefs -

The monk faced with the dilemma of depending on the very people he is fighting against as a result of his diagnosis, is forced to choose between staying alive and compromising on his beliefs.[82] His battle with the disease and the notions of those around him makes it an all the more difficult task to stick to his ideals.

! 5 Morality and Ethics -

The stockbroker’s pursuit of the stolen kidney’s recipient results in him questioning the morality of such a situation. The film also explores the intricacy of morality. It is the moral dilemmas of all three protagonists that tie the seemingly disparate parts of the film together.

Following is a talk by the director Anand Gandhi for TED, in which he discussed his ideas on enlightenment, an inspiration that seeded this movie - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y19StzTCLYI

How existential questions have shaped the unique vision of filmmaker Anand Gandhi and his debut film, Ship of Theseus

One day eight years ago, Anand Gandhi stopped wearing glasses. He had come across a book Take Off Your Glasses and See; the contents didn't impress him but the name struck a chord and Gandhi ditched his glasses on a whim. Last week, on a visit to an optician, he had his eyes checked out of curiosity. Although Gandhi is back to wearing glasses — albeit temporarily — his vision in the last eight years, he points out with glee, has improved. "It was an experiment. Shouldn't I get an Ignoble for this one?" he says, laughing.

Gandhi says that curiosity has driven him through his life, and it was encouraged in him by his mother and grandmother from an early age. "When I was in Class III, my librarian gave me an encyclopedia and I asked my mother to stay back with me after school for a couple of hours so I could read some more. I was fascinated by the book that seemed to have answers to so many of my questions."

Gandhi's interests, since his early years, have led him to explore the space between science and philosophy. Exposed to ideas of spirituality at a very young age through his grandmother, he began to doubt the certainties of religion by the time he was 13. It didn't seem to resolve the puzzle that was turning into infinite regression in his head: "If god made the universe, who made god?"

The 32-year-old director's life and career have since revolved around attempting to answer similar existential questions. This also forms the core of his debut feature film, Ship of Theseus, where he evokes a philosophical paradox from Greek mythology – if Theseus (the founder-king of Athens)'s ship was rebuilt plank by plank, would it remain the same ship, and if the older wood was used to build another ship, which then is truly the ship of Theseus?

! 6 The film questions the human understanding of beauty, non-violence and identity through three stories set in Mumbai: a blind photographer fears losing her understanding of beauty after her eyesight is restored; a monk fighting against violence is diagnosed with a liver disease and needs to consume medicine that may have been tested on animals; a stockbroker who has had a kidney transplant realises that the organ he has received may have been stolen. The film, which will release on July 19 in select theatres across India, is a bookend, Gandhi says, to all that he has learned till now.

"Disillusioned by a formal education system that didn't encourage knowledge but only focussed on getting a degree, I turned to ancient Indian thought for answers at the age of 17. I took up a course in Jain and Buddhist philosophy that I didn't complete and then embarked on spiritual shopping," says Gandhi, picking and choosing ideologies on the way.

The spiritual pursuit was also accompanied by a physical one. Having trained in web design, he got offers from spiritual organizations such as the Brahmakumaris to create their websites. Among other places, he spent time at Auroville in Pondicherry and an ashram in Dehradun. He also researched the lives of Indian spiritual greats such as Kabir and Dnyaneshwar in the hope that they had found the answers he had been searching for.

In the process, Gandhi met individuals who left a mark on him and have, in many ways, inspired the characters in Ship of Theseus. At 19, he was already working on anti-Enron activist Abhay Mehta's website altindia.net, had joined Alok Ulfat's theatre, performing in remote areas of the country, and was associated with the late Parag Trivedi and his cultural organization Sabrang. "Much like activist Satish Kumar who went on a pilgrimage for peace in 1962, the monk in my film walks," says Gandhi.

During this time, Gandhi started to write plays. Sugandhi, about a young nun who has begun to discover her sexuality, who questions why it is considered wrong, won several awards. Yet, his friends and family complained they didn't understand what he was trying to communicate. The realization that his work was burdened by jargon led him to simplify the narrative and explore short films as a medium.

Cinema has always been to Gandhi the most powerful medium of storytelling and exploration. "I understood so many thoughts and ideas through cinema. I grasped the fact that other senses are sharper in the visually challenged, through the phrase “mann se aankhon ka kaam liya” in the film Anuraag (1973). But that has been established 30 years ago and I didn't want my cinema to repeat what has been said before. I wanted it to take it further," Gandhi says, adding that he was reluctant to use the story about the blind photographer lest it sound cliched. Gandhi's first short in 2003, Right Here, Right Now, travelled the festivals circuit; it also brought him in touch with the three most important creative collaborators of his career: co-writer Khushboo Ranka, cinematographer Pankaj Kumar and co-producer- actor Sohum Shah. The film addressed the concept of karma by narrating a series of events, one led by another, and laid the foundation for Ship of Theseus. The latter, however, explores if the karmic cycle extends beyond one's own lifetime. ! 7 Although by this time the young director felt ready to make a feature-length film, it took seven years, and several rejections from producers, before work on Ship of Theseus began. The confidence that his mother had instilled in him was dented and thus began Gandhi's long battle with his arrogance regarding his own "genius". "For the first time I had failed, and I had to accept it," he says.

The lack of work and his unwillingness to take up offers to write for television and "stereotypical Bollywood films" led to a prolonged period of struggle and made him doubt his capabilities. "I had no money at all. Every once a year I would take up a two-day assignment that would make me some money. One year, the government asked me to write an anthem for the Indian women hockey team," he says. When his grandmother fell ill in 2009, Gandhi spent a year in the hospital nursing her. Amid vulnerabilities and disease, he reflected on and assimilated all that he had learned.

Once again, he turned to science for answers. A Douglas Adams fan, Gandhi then applied to his life the author's theory of 'Total Perspective Vortex' from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. "According to him, the worst punishment in the world is to be able to view yourself as no more than a tiny atom of carbon in this universe. I realized I needed to think beyond the short-term plan of making a film and look at the larger perspective — of learning and developing cinema that will not subscribe to rules and be honest."

But for someone who views philosophy as an extension of science and to whom "emotions" are merely "different forms of signals the brain sends out to the body to indicate sustenance or danger", it was a challenge to not let the film get didactic. "I haven't done it enough number of times to deduce a formula. But with Ship of Theseus, I took the liberty of designing characters that are already evolved. For instance, the dialogue which introduces the monk — “Sadhu kam shastri zyada hai” — sets the precedent for his understanding of science that he is so vehemently against," Gandhi says.

After Ship of Theseus releases, his production house, Recyclewala Films, with Shah, who also plays the stockbroker in the film, will start to focus on other films they want to produce. The first in line is Tumbad, a period fantasy directed by newbie Rahi Barve. "Sohum isn't a typical producer; he is looking to experiment and explore through cinema. Recyclewala Films is more a lab than a business venture where we are working on a 10-year plan of making cinema that isn't boring but will educate and groom us as well as the audience."

More such articles - http://karconversations.com/category/conversations/on-civilizations/

Sources - http://www.indianexpress.com/news/take-off-your-glasses-and-see/1140675/0 https://www.facebook.com/sotfilm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus_(film)

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