Pratishodh 1982

Pratishodh is a 1982 Indian Bollywood drama film released on 1982. The film is directed by Surinder Nath Dhir, produced by Kavita Nagapal.
"Pratishodh" is the story of a dim spark of life struggling to exist in the surrounding darkness the story of an impoverished lower middle- class man struggling to get his due form the system. The establishment here is portrayed as a great heap of deadwood routinely stigling any sign of life or movemnet - sometimes by stark indifference, sometimes by even seeming consideration for life. The violence done to life by the system is subtle, never open, accompained even by smiles, and for this reason the violence is deadlier than the moer demonstrative one, for it does not seek to destory life at one go but undermine it gradu- ally by creating deadly, not merely for those who try to struggle against it, but even for those who perpetrate it. For they are also reduced to utterly alienated, dehumanised automations. . But man discovers his compensation in the company of other human being s and life moves on. The action of the story circumstantially reveals a vast area of the harsh realities confronting hte lower middle class city dweller to-day. The many details of day to day living thus exposed make this story pre-eminently suited for cinema a cinema that will have meaning for a large mass of people. . The artistic merit of the story has been acclamied by a variety of minds. Gordon C. Roadermel has translated "Pratishodh" as "Retaliat- ion" and included it in his collection of fifteen representative modern Hindi short stories, "A Death in Delhi". Adil Jussawalla reviewing the book for the Times fo India weekly considers Doodhnath Singh to be the only writer who has effectively dealt with the problems of alienation, anonymity and `angst in the contemporary Indian context. "Pratishodh" demonstrates that modernity is nothing if it does not ultimately go beyond meaninglessness, moving through chaos to coherence. Check out this page for more updates on Pratishodh.