Most things in life aren't worth taking seriously, especially when you consider how little thought people put into the things they take seriously. We make some of our most consequential decisions on the basis of incomplete research, superficial understanding, and borrowed convictions. A man falls in love with a woman because of her looks, her body, the immediate attraction we romanticize as love at first sight, without bothering to inquire into her deeper thoughts, her philosophy, or her political beliefs until much later in the relationship, often after marriage. Then, when the woman turns out to be a person more complicated than the fantasy he constructed around her, he complains that the woman he fell in love with no longer exists (the reverse is equally true as well). Many people choose their careers by following their friends, who, in turn, have chosen theirs by listening to someone else. Years later, everyone complains bitterly about hating their jobs, as though their misery were an inexplicable cosmic punishment rather than the foreseeable consequence of letting other people make their decisions for them.
The same logic extends to religion. An individual is often made to follow a particular faith simply because it is the faith of their family and the majority of the people around them. They aren't necessarily encouraged to decide for themselves what God is, who God is, or why religious scriptures matter. Nor are they always encouraged to explore the philosophical ideas these scriptures consist of. Religious narratives are frequently presented to children as stories to be accepted rather than ideas to be examined, and questioning can become an act of disobedience rather than an exercise in understanding. When belief is inherited without inquiry and conformity is mistaken for conviction, upbringing begins to resemble indoctrination. The tragedy isn't that people believe in something; it's that they can spend their entire lives believing in something without ever asking themselves why they need to do so.
The same pattern governs how people choose their idols, role models, and politicians. They follow the crowd, fall for carefully manufactured public images, or mistake empty emotional gestures for evidence of character. In other words, people often don't know how to choose their heroes, which is why they're always one remark, one tweet, or one public gesture away from disillusionment. Consider the recent controversy surrounding Shah Rukh Khan, who has been trolled online for wishing Home Minister Amit Shah a happy birthday on Twitter (X). Did people really imagine that a superstar whose professional existence depends, in considerable part, on public approval would necessarily take political positions that alienate a significant portion of his audience? More importantly, why do people assume that a celebrity they admire must share their political convictions in the first place? The problem isn't that an actor has wished a politician on his birthday. A birthday greeting, by itself, tells us very little about someone's political beliefs. The problem is the expectation that a public figure must embody the political ideals his admirers have projected onto him with blind devotion.
This is why we should think twice, thrice, or even ten times before turning actors and politicians into figures of resistance. Public figures have their own interests, ambitions, contradictions, and calculations, none of which necessarily align with the fantasies of their admirers. The Shah Rukh Khan episode, then, reveals something rather amusing about celebrity worship: people are outraged not merely because a hero has disappointed them, but because they've mistaken their own projection for the hero's character. The resulting meltdown is a spectacle of people discovering that the image they constructed in their heads was never quite the person standing before them. How can one take these debates and outrages entirely seriously when so much of the outrage stems from a lack of self-knowledge? Perhaps the real joke is that people are forever getting offended by the discovery that they've been fooling themselves.
Perhaps comedy is particularly well suited to reflecting the current state of the nation back to itself, exposing the absurdities that solemnity and chest-thumping patriotism tend to cloak. In that sense, Aakash Kaushik's Udta Teer, at least in theory, arrives at precisely the right moment. What it sets out to spoof is the idea of patriotism as a performance of national pride, a collection of gestures, slogans, and declarations that people mistake for love of country. Given the shallow definition of patriotism that much of popular culture has normalized, this is potentially rich material. Movies like Border and Dhurandhar offer different versions of nationalistic spectacle, but the broader question remains: what does it actually mean to be patriotic? To defend your nation? And what, exactly, do you mean by "nation"? Is it a piece of land, a collection of boundaries drawn on a map, or something more complicated than either? Who, or what, is the nation being defended from? Is the enemy necessarily outside the borders? What about rapists, billionaires responsible for deforestation, people who litter public spaces, and government officials who keep digging up roads in the name of seemingly never-ending construction? It's entirely possible to find people belonging to these categories waving the Indian flag on August 15 while proudly declaring themselves patriotic. But what does their patriotism amount to when their actions undermine the very society they claim to love?
In everyday language, the answer is often supplied by appearances. Rousing speeches, salutes to the flag, and declarations of national pride become convenient substitutes for the harder business of examining one's conduct. Patriotism is reduced to a performance, and the performance is accepted as evidence. This is what makes the premise of Udta Teer so potent: a Pakistani spy, Bilal Ahmad (Ayushmann Khurrana), loses his memory and develops an intense love for India. By losing his memories, Bilal also loses the conditioning that once determined how he understood himself and the country to which he belonged. His transformation raises an intriguing question: if a person's national identity can be so profoundly altered by the loss of memory, how much of that identity was ever truly their own? We live surrounded by borrowed ideas, inherited loyalties, and images of ourselves that we rarely bother to examine. Perhaps the identities we defend so fiercely are not as solid as we'd like to believe.
Kaushik begins on a promising note. For a while, it seems as though we're finally going to get a genuinely patriotic movie that questions the assumptions behind national pride instead of merely recycling familiar slogans. Alas, the film gradually retreats from its own provocation, as though Kaushik has grown wary of following his satire to its logical conclusion. Instead of questioning the simplistic equation of India with its flag and an imaginary population of uniformly virtuous citizens, he eventually falls back on the same conventional understanding of patriotism. The result is a comedy built around a collection of gags, a few of which are genuinely hilarious. I couldn't contain myself during a sequence in which Bilal (or call him Vikrant) saves M. D. Burman (Rahul Bose) from men sent to kill him at the hospital. Kaushik gets tremendous comic mileage out of Bose's wide-eyed expressions, which deserve a credit of their own. Bose also delivers some terrific physical comedy when he's literally manipulated like a puppet on wires for someone else's amusement. It's a shame, then, that Kaushik doesn't push the joke into the realm of the utterly preposterous by giving us an interaction between the incapacitated Burman and a woman who's been led to believe that he loves her. The possibility of an even more absurd comic set piece is right there, waiting to be exploited.
Had Kaushik simply trusted his comic instincts, Udta Teer might still have been an entertaining film, even if it fell short of becoming the scathing satire its premise promises. Unfortunately, he seems unable to resist the urge to get serious, and the film's momentum is repeatedly interrupted by sob stories about dead parents and relationship drama involving divorce, pregnancy, and breakups. Did it never occur to Kaushik that comedy might be the most effective way to explore this material? Or did he lose confidence in the film's irreverence, afraid of challenging an audience increasingly accustomed to the solemnity of nationalistic action cinema? Whatever the reason, he proves far more adept at making us laugh than at making us feel for his characters. His attempts at drama lack the conviction of his comedy, and the film's earnestness repeatedly lands like a party pooper, interrupting the fun just as it's getting started.
The problem becomes particularly pronounced after the interval, when the film increasingly seems to punish us for having enjoyed ourselves earlier. Kaushik piles twist upon twist, but without a sufficiently sustained satirical perspective, these revelations leave us less entertained than dizzy and baffled. The narrative becomes so preoccupied with surprising us that it loses sight of what made its premise interesting in the first place. Kaushik's arrow flies in a zigzag, eventually striking the very target he should have avoided: himself. In trying to accommodate different sections of the audience, he sacrifices the distinctive comic and political voice that might have made the film memorable. If self-sabotage were a competitive sport, Udta Teer would be a serious contender for the gold medal. It's a film that begins with the potential to puncture the absurdities of hollow patriotism but gradually retreats into the very conventions it could have demolished. Kaushik squanders a juicy premise, a gifted comic ensemble, and, most disappointingly, the considerable political potential of his own ideas.
Final Score - [4/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times