Rajesh Khanna philosophised fate when he said, ‘Zingadi aur maut upar wale ke haath hai (life and death are in God’s hands) in his 1971 hit Anand. For most, the dialogue took on a life of its own when the unprecedented coronavirus pandemic struck in 2020. But not Marathi director Ananth Mahadevan. Rather than resigning to fate, he decided to question it. His recently released film, Aata Vel Zaali (It’s Time To Go), is an outcome of those ruminations.
It features veteran actors Dilip Prabhavalkar and Rohini Hattangady as a couple who move court to have the liberty to exit their lives when they want. The arguments and debates that follow probe the nuances of passive versus active euthanasia.
“During Covid, we thought that the world was coming to an end. Everybody started trying to read the meaning of what it meant to be alive and why we deserved such a terrible end. For example, a professor in Kerala was a healthy person who wanted a dignified exit and had applied for legalising active euthanasia. The court turned it down and in sheer frustration, he committed suicide. Similarly, an elderly couple living in a chawl in Girgaum, Maharashtra too had written to the President to legalise active euthanasia too,” says Mahadevan, adding, “I summarised these and other case studies into this one couple, the Leles. Everybody plans for the ‘tomorrow’ in life. But, nobody has the guts to plan for the tomorrow after tomorrow. That is what we are looking at closely in the film.”
Euthanasia isn’t a new subject in films. The play Whose Life is It Anyway?, which was later made into a motion picture in 1981, spoke about this, as did the Hindi film Guzaarish (2010). Even in Ek Naari Do Roop (1972), the scheming young wife of a wealthy man urges her boyfriend to kill her quadriplegic husband, terming it mercy killing. The key question is whether one is in control of making the decision to quit the world or is it thrust upon them. In Aata Vel Zaali, active euthanasia is pitched as an extension of one’s right to dignity. Old age can be messy.
“Earlier films on the subject were about passive euthanasia, which happens when the family and the court decide that they do not want to put the person through further torture. Active euthanasia is anticipating passive euthanasia just before the red signals start coming their way, and a stroke puts them in a vegetative state,” he says, adding, “Remember, the couple was independent. They neither had any children nor debts to repay. I tried not to copy any of the stereotypes. My story is quite simple—we don’t have control over our birth, but we should be able to control our death. Please note that instead of just thinking about themselves, the couple were also trying to create lawful precedence. Which is why they avoid short cuts and illegal methods like suicide.”
Bollywood films in which the protagonists die at the end have historically enjoyed a high success rate. But, the protagonists in Aata Vel Zaali are not typical heroes. Here, death does not come at the end of a high-pitched climax. The film takes the risky route to look at death in a positive way.
“It was frightening because the film needed an unusual approach right from the writing stage. Casting too was like walking a tightrope. I told the lead pair that it was not about being obsessed with death, but about being convinced about a happy goodbye. It was not a death wish,” the filmmaker says. After all, Zindagi badi honi chahiye, lambi nahi (it is about how great, and not how long, your life is).