Salim Langede Pe Mat Ro (1989) - Saeed Akhtar Mirza

​Saeed Akhtar Mirza's Salim Langede Pe Mat Ro is a biting neorealist saga that is a pacifist plea for religious tolerance and mutual aid. Through its principal character, Salim, a low-level Muslim gangster whose embraced sycophancy as a means to get ahead, the film displays a multi-prong assault on the social state of society in Indian, being both an affront to willful ignorance and the toxic divisions which manifest themselves between the Hindi majority and the Muslim minority. Salim is a man whose spatial reality and familial experiences have led him to derive all value from financial prosperity, having a dog-eat-dog mentality due in part to what he has witnessed peripherally with his father and brother, whose failures in life he views as a sign of weakness. Cultural unrest and myopic thinking restrict any potential for social harmony and economic progress due to the embracement of this perpetual cycle of prejudice and violence which stifles unity and the potential for upward mobility. At a minimum, Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro is on-par with some of the more canonical works of neorealism, being a pensive character study and thematically assured work thats message could not be more clear: Education is a powerful and essential force against religious zealotry and socio-economic degradation. Power must be shared among all for India, and humankind, to truly prosper. Everyone deserves dignity, poverty is not a pejorative statement on one's utility, but often an environmental reality for many who are unfairly born into circumstances in which a way out is extremely difficult. A major work, and one of my favorite discoveries of 2020 to-date.