This cruel , uncaring world and its side-effects...

  Recently, I decided to watch two movies that have a mental health hospital as the stage on which stories of their main characters unfold. One is an Indian movie in Hindi!

If you have watched the old classic 'One Flew Over The Cuckoos' Nest' (OFOTC) with Jack Nicholson as the main character then you are in the right neighborhood/Genre/ Category. The mischief that Jack N's character unleashes in the mental health hospital is very humorous. He does get punished with a dose of the much feared electric shock treatment. However, the movie has a serious and sad ending.

The other movie is Girl Interrupted, the movie I watched recently. It is milder than OFOTC with Winona Rider and Angelina Jolie as main characters/patients in a popular mental health hospital . Winona's character is scared and sensitive though somewhat delusional. Angelina is bold and rebellious somewhat like Jack Nicholson in OFOTC ! Tattoos and  rings adorn her thin frame! One meets girls like the two characters in buses, public libraries  and cheap restaurants in many cities in the USA. That is a sad fact....

The Hindi movie is kind of a tragedy also set in a mental hospital. The movie has all the ingredients of a typical Bollywood movie, yet is very different from the other popular movies ! The name of the movie is Khamoshi (pronounced 'Kha + Mow + She'. The word means 'Silence'). 

A young poet (Rajesh Khanna), jilted by a lady, displays signs of paranoia when he suspects that the lady is trying to get him killed. He feels used by the lady whom he loved and who is a professional singer. He is treated by electric shock also! Almost. The doctor assigns a lady nurse (Waheeda Rehman) to cure him  by playing his new lady love. She has expertise in that category, you see, because she has cured another patient earlier (Dharmendra) whom she repeatedly refers to as Dev. Dev has left the hospital after recovery and is now happily married - he was in love with the nurse and the nurse seems to have reciprocated her love. This part of the story is shared with the viewer via flashbacks and a song ('Tum Pukar Lo') ! She is hesitant to take up Rajesh's case initially because she is still suffering from the separation from Dev, the previous patient!! However, she changes her mind after meeting Rajesh....

As the new patient RK recovers and is about to go home, the nurse has a mental breakdown. She confesses to the doctor that she has never 'acted' (like a lover) implying that she really fell in love with the two patients. She is left alone to suffer silently as each patient leaves the hospital. She becomes a  patient in the same hospital where she once cured other patients !!

The Imitation Game :- The Turing Machine.

 I have not heard so much 'British' since I first watched 'The Jewel In The Crown' and 'Heat And Dust' several decades ago!

I had heard of 'Turing' when I was a University student; there was a brief mention of the 'Turing' machine in a formal way  as a  scientific idea that led to the invention of modern computers. However, it was quite different from the 'historical' perspective presented in this emotionally charged movie. The story is about five young people who are hired by British government to decode German encrypted messages which will help Britain save millions of lives by pre-empting the German strikes on their ships.The German submarines had destroyed many British ships  including some carrying food. USA was supplying daily rations![The events took place during the World War 2].

The five young chaps are very smart - their expertise ranges from mathematics to solving  crossword puzzles, you see! They argue and insult each other initially about who has the better idea - but one amongst them is the 27 year old math professor named Allan Turing; who is considered a prodigy. His idea was to invent a machine that will help them decode the messages on the same day - there are trillions of ways to  encode the messages using the small typewriter like German machine named Enigma.

Turing faces a lot of opposition from his bosses as he slowly trudges along building the machine. They threaten to fire him and stop his funding. Finally by sheer luck he notices a pattern in the incoming messages , which dramatically reduces the number of ways a message could have been encoded! Now they have a working model of the machine that will help the British decode German messages fast enough to take action.

Turing names his machine 'Christopher' after his friend by that name who had saved his life and sanity when he was nailed below the wood floor by a few of his mischievous school friends during his school days. That might explain why he did not have any friends and appeared so unemotional!

He even saves his love interest's life(played by Kiera Knightly) by asking her to distance herself from him towards the end when his boss issues a warning that she might be charged for high treason for possession of a few German messages in her bag. She was part of the team that helped Turing in building the machine. Turing confesses of being a homosexual in his younger days when the British law treated homosexuality as a crime. He compromises by accepting psychiatric treatment instead and becomes a sick person. Turing died at the age of 42. [In reality, Turing made many contributions to the field of Computer Science after the Enigma project that led to the building of Modern computers. Can you imagine a world where there were no computers !?]

All the actors play their roles expertly generating appropriate amount  of drama and emotions. The real Turing does not appear as handsome and entertaining in his photographs!