I Wish I Was in Kansas

Fair warning: everything I’m about to say is going to be quirky.

Today, I wish I was in Kansas.

I can’t say I’ve ever wished that before.

Not even when I was trying to embody Kansas in all my pig-tailed glory while playing Dorothy in my high school’s production of the Wizard of Oz. (Cue cheesy 14 year old pic.)

But, see, today in the up-and-coming cultural center (not really) of Olathe, Kansas, they are showing this eccentric, foreign film that I’ve been crushing over for a while.

It’s called Guzaarish (tip: it’s Indian). And if the world were more perfect, and I could just get to good old Olathe by early evening, I could catch a showing at either 8:20 or 11:20.

Guzaarish is a movie by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, who is so Indian I can’t in my lilly-white-All-American-girlness even pronounce his name.

I recognize his name in print though (which is an ignorant start, I guess).

I first heard of Bhansali in fleeting references to Bollywood on the internet.

It’s not that I’m googling “Bollywood”, you understand. It’s that once, or maybe even twice, I encountered the following line:

“[Sanjay Leela Bahnsali] has always tried to delve into the problem of the troubled mind in each of his films. [He] explains that since he cannot go ahead and meet every person who is suffering in this world, he seeks to pay homage to them through his works.”

If you make that statement–about someone’s work paying homage to the suffering–about just about anyone, I’ve got a mile long hook in my mouth that insists I know all about them.

So with that one-liner in mind, I got to exploring what the guy has done.

He made a movie about a deaf and mute couple called Khamoshi, for example.

And in his most recent project, Guzaarish, he’s produced the story of a magician who becomes a paraplegic.

In it, a world-renowned magician suffers serious injuries when a competitor booby traps one of his stunts–something you may expect to happen in the final minutes of the movie, capping off a couple hour battle between the illusionists (can anyone say The Prestige?).

But instead, the movie starts here–introducing the paralysis early, because it seems, Guzaarish isn’t about stage magic at all. It’s about the real-life magic of basking in hope even in hardship.

The film eventually turns into a treatise on quality of life, where the main character fights for his legal right to choose a dignified end to his life–which doesn’t appeal to my moral or spiritual sensibilities. But the meat of the movie, as I read, seems to be about his journey to maintain a belief in dreams even in hardship (in the movie, he becomes the spirited voice of humor behind a radio talk show and also takes on the task of passing on his legacy of illusions to an aspiring admirer).

And that sense of impossibility–that a paraplegic could be so smitten with imagination that the loss of function cannot kill his spirit–is the sort of dream I can get my heart around.

It’s not a boring American dream like “retiring in Florida,” “building a comfortable nest egg,” or “buying a maintenance-free condo so you can golf every day.”

It’s a dream that earns it’s “dream” status because of the impossible-ness of the character’s task.

As you check out the trailer below, then, I leave you with this:

You know your possible dreams.

But what would you dream if you were willing to live in the impossible?

(I’m not going to Kansas to prove my point, but–just so you know–I have hunted down a theater in Novi, Michigan to see Guzaarish myself.)