Parable about madness and love

Yogaraj Bhat's latest film Manasaare (Heartfelt) echoes Foucault's idea that reason-obsessed societies push intuitive, unconventional minds into the asylum



Even if you don’t know any Kannada, I recommend you catch the film Manasaare (Heartfelt), now running in cinemas across Bangalore. It debates madness and sanity, couching it all in a light-hearted love story. Made by Yogaraj Bhat, director of the biggest Kannada hit of all time (Mungaaru Male), Manasaare takes you through terrain that is definitely exciting by current Indian movie standards.

Manohar, played by the dimpled Diganth, is considered a basket case because he has no interest in becoming a doctor or engineer. He is compared unfavourably with his more studious cousin who scores high marks and is all set to go abroad. Manohar just can’t earn any appreciation in his middle class world. With his blithe, irreverent talk, he loses the love of the pretty girl next door, and the warm companionship of his less educated cable operator-friend.

After a disastrous experiment where he tries to show how electricity can be produced from the mechanical energy generated by vehicles cruising on public roads (disastrous because a police van trips on his device and the policemen lock him up), a dejected Manohar is sauntering along the highway when he is mistaken for a rehab patient and picked up. At the fort-like rehab centre, he meets several interesting people, including the wise and funny Shankarappa (played by Raju Talikote), and Dollar, the US-returned inventor branded insane because his gadget, an electronic device to clean kids’s bottoms, leaves a boy with a burnt backside. Manohar’s protests that he is perfectly fine take him nowhere because the doctor just won’t listen to anything the patients say.

But just when it looks like he can escape, Manohar sets his eyes on Devika (the fresh-faced Aindrita Rai), an inmate in the women’s section. Their love progresses as they talk through a hole in the wall (in scenes echoing Adoor’s Malayalam classic Mathilukal). The smitten Manohar, dressed as an ambulance driver, smuggles her out into exhilaratingly shot landscapes (Sathya Hegde) that contrast with the claustrophobic world of the asylum. Predictably, her very real trauma is healed by Manohar’s love, but life isn’t easy when they step out into the ‘sane’ world.

Director Bhat pits the pragmatic, competitive, and unimaginative outside world against the creative, human, and often irrational world of the ‘insane’, and echoes Foucault’s thesis that a reason-obsessed civilisation pushes intuitive, unconventional minds into cruel asylums. Like the French philosopher, Bhat acknowledges there is much that can be questioned about psychiatry, but it isn't a discipline you can do away with.

My father’s younger brother was ‘mad’, and we lived with him for more than 30 years. He could be funny and witty with words and songs, but we dreaded the days he turned violent and smashed framed pictures and whatever fragile stuff he could lay his hands on. Sometimes, he just stepped out and kept walking wherever the road took him, not returning for days and weeks.

I loved Manasaare, and could relate to Bhat’s neatly told parable about madness, sanity, and love. We all grapple with our mad inner worlds, I don’t know if I have it in me to willingly live with someone like my uncle again.