Wed. Mar 27th, 2024

It was two years back when I first watched No Smoking, a 2007 film directed by Anurag Kashyap and to be honest, I didn’t get anything from the first watch. And so far now, I have watched the film 3 times and every time there’s something new I discover. And after actually getting the concept of the film, I would say that if I had to choose any one of Anurag Kashyap films, it would be definitely No Smoking though I admire all his films, Black Friday and Ugly specially, yet No Smoking will always be on top now.

To be precise, it is a story of K, (John Abraham) a chain-smoker who visits a rehabilitation centre owned by Baba Bengali (Paresh Rawal) in order to quit smoking and what further follows seems to be a nonlinear plot, but it is actually based on a man’s imagination, the complex condition, a human brain can get into if conditioned accordingly.

A scene from No Smoking

A scene from No Smoking

Based on Quitters by Stephen King, the film bounds viewers with a lot of confusions. The story goes from conscious to unconscious mind, and the reality is actually pretty simple maybe just like it’s synopsis. But his mind takes him to a trip, which is just his imagination, all credits to the treatment at the rehabilitation centre. It raises a lot of questions in the mind of viewers as in how complex a human brain can be and hypnotizing it can get a person to a lot more than nightmares.

Another arc of the film No Smoking, certainly refers to Anurag Kashyap’s professional life in the Hindi Film Industry. A director whose first few works fell under the prey of censor board, leading to some of them getting banned completely, many of them getting released lately. The character K may resemble Kashyap, smoking as in his true writing, and the rehabilitation centre as the Censor Board.

If you haven’t watched No Smoking, you should definitely look forward to it. Meanwhile stay tuned to The Indian Wire for more such articles.

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