The Disciple2020

I don’t remember any self-discovery film recently that made me think a lot after the credits started rolling in. I was in total awe with the way Chaitanya directed this and framing every scene beautifully with Aditya Modak’s true-to-life performance. It’s a self-discovery of man who is mediocre in his singing and ruined by the fanatic nature who follows his gurus to an extent that he has made them demigods, in the midst of all these he doesn’t realise his harsh truth which is right inside him and just continue doing what he’s doing, which is being mediocre singer. All these Chaitanya doesn’t shout and tell you. It’s from his beautifully staged scenes and Aditya’s brilliant performance that showcases his life from 2006-2016 flawlessly. My absolute favourite scene has to be towards the end at the bar where Sharad gets to know about his gurus and their bitter truth. “People can’t differentiate between a fact and a fiction” is what is told to Sharad which makes him angry but that gradually also makes him realise his true-self as he starts finding flaws in him as he just heard about his gurus flaws or dark side.  There’s also one small pattern regarding the frequency at which modern world is changing  — We see one student immediately wanting to join a fusion band in his college, then there’s a small town girl who is a classical singer in a reality show gets fame overnight and she suddenly starts singing popular Bollywood tracks in the show with heavy makeups —all these are current trends but Sharad is neither changing himself to woo the current pulse of an audience nor he’s getting better at his singing. All these made me wonder whether he’s really mediocre or just that classical music always takes time to perfect??  Because his guru in her old tapes tell :  “If you want the truth of the Raag to spontaneously reveal itself, you will have to rid your mind of falsehood, greed and impure thoughts and achieve Inherent discipline”  So to achieve that inherent discipline, Sharad was in the right path trying to be a better classical singer but was just taking time?? Did he really self-discover or did he just started self-loathing himself for not achieving much in that field as quickly as he wanted to?? Either ways he discovered himself.  If a film is making me ask all these questions then for sure this is one of the best films on Self-discovery and easily the best one I have watched in a long long time.