ANAND - How to live the last months of your life!!

ANAND is a Bollywood hit from 1970s. It was and is very popular because it portrays a sympathetic story of a cancer patient in India who decides to spend the last few months of his life by sharing happiness and humor with people known and unknown.  The movie has the big star of the time Rajesh Khanna playing the role of the cancer patient named Anand and Amitabh Bachchan playing a doctor, who agrees to share his home with the patient. 

The story has humor with undertone of sadness and romance expressed thru three or four songs, all of which are still popular. The incessantly chatty patient Anand and impatient but polite doctor play well against each other. 

When the doctor delivers the sad news to Anand that he has 'Lympho-sorcoma of the intestine', Anand responds jovially 'Wow, what a nice name, Lympho Sorcoma. If one were to choose a disease it should have a fancy name like that!' 

Anand has nostalgia for his lady friend, whom he asked to marry someone else ,because he is destined to die. Her memory is enshrined in his book of poetry and a solitary flower as depicted in the song above.

'Sometimes our hearts fail to meet, in spite of our best efforts and sometimes
perfect strangers become our life long friends, as if they have known us thru many births' goes one of the songs. That summarizes the life of Anand until he passes away one destined day.

THE INSIDER - What Price Honesty ?

[I saw this movie several years back and so I can just recall a bird's eye view of it.]

It is the story repeated again and again in the history of humanity - how honest people get punished and tortured by others who are afraid of being exposed. Whether it is ancient Greece, Egypt or modern democracies like USA and India, the world is still unsafe for rebels who stand up to authority!! 

The Insider depicts one aspect of this continuing saga in a modern environment.  There are people struggling every day to retain their integrity as they and their families bear the consequences when they stand up to big companies and big governments. They may not be poisoned when they say that the earth is spherical and not flat and that the earth rotates around the sun and not the other way around, as they would have been in the ancient world, but they might be 'trapped' , isolated and punished by the 'system' . This system includes the network of TV, print and now the internet. 

Click for The Insider Movie Trailer

The Insider depicts such a true story of a professional employee who discovers that one of the cigarette BRAND his employer makes has a chemical that might not be safe for smokers. Yet, the company continues to sell that brand until that employee becomes a whistle-blower, at which point there are attempts to physically harm him and his family. He asks his wife and children to leave him so they can be safe. I believe it is on the CBS show '60 Minutes' that he exposes his employer. The constant threats to his life and the forced isolation take a toll on his mental health and he ends up as a school teacher instead of a highly paid employee of a big company!!

[Add to this, how an honest immigrant faces even more of a pressure and competition from the locals and others and you will notice that the equation becomes more complex!! At that point, even '60 Minutes' will become biased and not help him, you see.]