Daily Times

In Nitya Mehra’s creative debut Bollywood movie Baar Baar Dekho, we are treated to a primal human desire: the question of ‘what if’. What if we knew how our choices would pan out and could correct our missteps?

Eye-candy Sidharth Malhotra plays the role of a budding mathematician, Jai Varma, who is caught up in a quandary: choosing between an impending run-of-the-mill marriage with the lissom and effulgent Diya, played by Katrina Kaif, and pursuing his dream of going to Cambridge to fathom the mysteries of his field. After a pre-marriage tiff during which he draws the ire of Diya for appearing non-committal, and some heavy drinking, he is launched willy-nilly into a wild ride, zig-zagging across time in a nonlinear fashion and getting glimpses of both his multiple futures and multiple pasts.

Mehra, who previously worked on the Life of Pi, has passed her test as a director with flying colours. This is no mean feat. To begin with, Baar Baar Dekho builds on some iconic literary and cinematic work: Dickens’ Christmas Carol, as well as the critically acclaimed movies It’s a wonderful life and Groundhog Day. How does Mehra pull off this feat coming in the wake of such illustrious predecessors?

For one, Mehra adds complexity. She creatively breaks the narrative structure’s linearity into cyclical patterns. Jai thinks that his presence at the Civil Court is necessitated by his son’s marriage, but he is shattered to realise that the judge has just granted his wife a divorce. He returns (in time) to set this right by managing to avoid an affair with the stunningly voluptuous wife of his best friend (Sayani Gupta turns the small role she is given into a strong performance). However, he still cannot avoid getting divorced. Our primordial yearning of perfectibility, as in Groundhog Day or to go back even further, as in David Copperfield, rears its head again and again.

Then, in line with Stendhal, Hardy, Kafka and Camus, Mehra explores loneliness. In a poignant scene, Jai on waking up one day (waking up is ubiquitous in the movie) warms up to the many friendly people in his house, only to be accosted with the dead body of his mother lying on the floor. Only then does he realise the utter loneliness of man in the cosmos and almost reflexively holds onto the hand of his wife. Alas, she is not his wife anymore: his mad pursuit of his work has alienated his children and has driven his wife away to someone who could better fulfil her dreams. Now with the death of his mother, Jai has reaped what he had sown. His life lies in tatters.

Some critics are not happy. They point out that the characters lack depth. They miss the point: to bring out all of the above in across-time forward and backward peregrinations, one must construct non-complex characters. It is the script and cinematography that propel characters, as in Voltaire’s Candide, rather than their breadth or complexity. Do we all need to be reminded by critics that Katrina is not Kajol and that Sidharth is not Aamir Khan? Malhotra, the erstwhile model, has done remarkably well in this role, proving to be more than mere eye candy. It is to the credit of Mehra that she has managed to put together such a difficult movie.

The movie also explores work-life conflict. According to management experts, the conflict occurs when the demands of one role deplete the resources needed to fulfil another role. Jai’s son is desperate for his father to attend his football game, his daughter longs for a hug and his wife wants him to be present at her first exhibition in seven years. His busyness prevents him from attending to these, on hindsight, simple requests.

Jai is, of course, not the only victim of this conflict. Work-life conflict is present in abundance in Pakistan, especially for women. In our research we suggest one way of reducing it by arguing that if companies make available flexible work arrangements (FWAs), then job satisfaction will improve and work-life conflict will decrease. FWAs are of course one of the many ways in which work-life conflict can be turned into work-life balance. In the movie, Jai gets one more chance at the end to set things right and he succeeds this time to the relief of the audience. But the management world does not need the magic of movies to achieve this. Once managers understand that a happy worker is a productive worker, they will find new ways to make their workers happier and more productive.

The happy ending of Baar Baar Dekho will become a realisation for many families and not just the stuff of fairy tales

Dr Aamir Khan is an Associate Professor, and Ms. Sana Azar is an Assistant Professor at the Lahore School of Economics