The devil in us?

Murder at Orient Express (2017)

What was supposed to be an Agatha Christie's whodunnit turned out to be highly philosophical one. Sure, we all, by now must be quite familiar with the quirky Inspector Hercule Poirot and his peculiar ways of solving crimes. Here Mon. Poirot carries with him a baggage of a melancholic past and tries to make sense of the actions of mankind; his penchant for criminal activities, his failure to follow the path acceptable as the correct one should be.

A single action has many repercussions. A single turn of event that goes against our desires strains our relationships, changes our perspective of the future, increases anxiety, induces phobia, shatters confidence, brings psychosomatic maladies, destroys families literally and metaphorically as well as destroys the whole community in more ways than we realise.

All after all the generations of our existence, we still succumb to our primal desires to be blinded by anger and emotions. At the crucial time of reckoning, our hearts (and other organs) dictate our next moves. The decisive and critical mind is kept shut from the equation. Bypassing rational thinking, we are left to deal with the after-effects of our mindless actions. Pretty soon, we would realise that the hole that we have dug soon metamorphose into a rapid quicksand which engulfs us.

Is forgiveness an option to start a clean slate? Unfortunately, it is not so simple. We never learn from our mistakes. We only turn wiser, not to repeat our earlier that got us caught in the first place. We jostle, we snake, we burrow, and we squirm to deny all wrongdoings. We blame the devil in us that control our sense and hope to get a get-out-from-jail card.

Whodunit of a real murder

Rahasya (Secret, Hindi; 2015)


After watching the 'Mousetrap' in London, my interest in murders suddenly had a resurgence of sorts. I was pleasantly surprised when this Hindi whodunit came along. In the same vein as Agatha Christie's mystery murders, this film is mind boggling in its storyline. This story is, however, based on the real-life murder that took place in a middle-class household of the Talwars in New Delhi in May 2008.

Aarushi Talwar, a 14year old only child of Dr Rajesh and Dr Nupur, dentists, was found dead in her bedroom. Before long it became a national scandal when their male servant was found murdered too. Pretty soon, the media had a field day conducting trial-by-media and practising yellow journalism. After much sensationalism with shoddy police work, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) moved in. Even though CBI could not conclusively implicate anyone for the double murders, the courts decided to pass life imprisonment for both parents along the line of honour killing.

Rahasya has many elements similar to the Aarushi Talwar's murder. Many of the plots were altered garnishing it with more masala to tickle the fancy of Bollywood moviegoers. Blatant abuse of power and police brutality is accepted as the norm. Everyone in the story has something stacked in their closet. Illicit affairs seem like an accepted practice. After much twisting and stretching of the imagination, the story sadly ends with a somewhat unbelievable ending.

A laudable effort, I should say, as the film-makers were bold enough to come out with a movie that broke the mould of a typical Bollywood film layout - no love scenes, no comedy, no songs and, of course, running around the park. It is all pure whodunit murder mystery!

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