Sanjay refuses to sit with pain.
Raghava refuses to leave it behind.
if you’ve read my previous blogs, you will know by now that i absolutely adore sanjay sahu and Veera raghava. but for this particular blog, i wanted to keep the fanboy out of the fence and breakdown one aspect of both of them: how they deal with pain.
all of us respond to pain differently. some take it head on, while others suffer in silence. i don’t Think there’s a right or a wrong way to Deal with pain, but i found something interesting about how two people going through the same pain deal with it.
from the outside, both men have lost someone close to them. both have unresolved pain. both resort to violence, some or the other way. yet, the way they live their lives couldn’t be more different.
sanjay sahu is outspoken. he jokes too often, has fun too often, and lives as if he doesn’t even have a past. he’s scared of stillness, maybe because of what he has to confront if he’s still. his movement is not a sign of healing, perhaps a mode of survival.
but veera raghava is his opposite. he’s stoic, almost still every moment. it’s as if he’s replaying the pain he’s been through again and again, often unable to get past it. he feels like someone who’s still processing whatever has happened, and is still not in sink with the outside world yet.
where sanjay avoids memory, raghava lives inside it.
i think that’s the fascinating difference between these two.
and that choice of how a character externalizes or internalizes pain, changes everything. dialogue, body language, and the pacing of each scene. if you observe closely, both these movies are about a man dealing with their past. the choice in which they deal with this pain changes the entire course of the film.
i don’t think there’s a right or a wrong way to deal with pain. they are simply written to deal with the pain differently.
and maybe that’s why they stay with us even after so long.