Shades of Gray

A lot of my female friends who have watched Dev D, a modern take on Devdas conceptualized by actor Abhay Deol and directed by Anurag Kashyap, have dismissed the film and the concept. The reasons I hear are one of these:

• There is nothing new about the story except an overdose of sex
• It’s all about sex and drugs

However, it is this alleged ‘overdose’ of sex which indirectly hints at the message that today’s younger audiences should have grasped. But first, let me honestly accept that some of the scenes are indeed quite shocking. Like the one where Paro, played by newcomer Mahie Gill, carries a mattress to the fields on a bicycle in order to be able to make out with her lover Dev. Or the dialogues that Chanda, the MMS scandal victim played by Koel, speaks to her on-screen father.

Let me make it clear here that while these scenes are shocking, it doesn’t mean that they don’t happen in real life. Go to villages and you would find that couples having sex in a field is nothing out of the world. Chanda uses the same slangs and vocabulary that today’s college going crowd uses daily.

So where is the message I am talking about? The message lies in the treatment Paro receives at the hands of Dev. And it’s not a single message, rather there are four points that the director leaves its audiences to ponder with.

The first point is the obsession with sex that today’s college going youth has. In the movie, it is not difficult to assume that Dev is addicted to porn. Look at his expressions when he is downloading Paro’s topless picture on his laptop and you would know what he has been learning in London. The second example of this is when Dev tells a married Paro that he wants to love her and in the very next scene talks about ‘making love’ as if you cannot love a person without ‘making’ love.

The second point about our society reveals itself in the way a village guy who claims to love Paro talks about her sexual behavior. Not only he says this to Dev, he brags about it to others as well. I was surprised how true this is to real life. During my intermediate and engineering days, we often heard such stories about girls who were more outgoing that the average. And the rumour-mongers often went to great lengths to claim that their stories were nothing but the truth. The fact, as we know now, is that 9 out of 10 such stories were totally fabricated. How easy it is for we guys to malign a girl’s character, isn’t it?

In the movie, Dev believes the rumours he hears about Paro. The reason is simple. Because Paro is ready to do it with Dev, her beloved, she must be doing it with other guys as well. And he calls her a slut. Isn’t it amazing how quickly we brand women who are not meek and have a mind of her own as ‘sluts’? This is the third point that Anurag Kashyap makes.

Dev refuses to marry Paro, breaks her heart and his own in the process. And after he goes on a path of self-destruction, he finally meets Chanda and finds love. And it is here where the fourth and probably the most disguised point about the movie comes to light. Not many people have understood that Dev D is a slap on the face of a male-dominated society that is so obsessed with a women’s virginity. Dev has no reason to doubt Paro’s virginity but does so because he himself is no saint and finally accepts as his own a woman who has taken to prostitution. Can it get any more hard-hitting than this?

Dev D is a tight slap across the male community who equates love with sex and brands women as sluts.