It’s almost a daily routine for me to think of taking off, a la Che Guevara. After numerous short & long trips around, and many many credit card payments later, my mind still cannot help drifting away, to unexplored lands far far away. I’m trying to fulfil my appetite for new stories through movies, while cooling my heels in Bombay being ’in between vacations’.
So I think watching ’motorcycle diaries’ was purely from info point of view, from a traveller’s fascination point of view. What they did, where did they go, what happened and how it changed their perspective. So when you watch motorcycle diaries, do not expect being ’entertained’ per se. Its something to feed your curiosity for people & concepts around you. So instead of the bearded Che that we’ve seen on tees & posters, its fun drooling over Gael Garcia Bernal and can see why people he meets in his journey fall for him ;).
The roots of Che Guevara’s politics & his role in the Cuban war of liberation, in some way trace back to what he saw in this year long trip across latin America (But that’s not what I’m here to discuss!). What he & his pal Alberto have in common is the love for the road & their profession, medicine. While Alberto is the happy go lucky kind who is casual with his white lies to get their way around (they’re mostly broke), there are several instances wherein Che risks food & shelter by being brutally honest. At the leprosy camp, he defies the divide between the healthy & the unhealthy by refusing to comply with the basic rules laid out by the nurses, such as wearing gloves, not shaking hands with the lepers etc. While we here, in india, are used to extremely poverty, bad infrastructure & curse the overt democracy of opposing anything from lesbianism in cinema to a ban of 25+ year old "battered boxes on wheels thingies " stuttering around the street, called cabs; you seem a little puzzled by Che’s reaction to poverty. You get a déjà vu of Ashutosh Gowarikar’s Swades, where the protagonist, Mohan Bhargava feels the same way. In your mind, you go though the numerous discussions & debates you’ve had amongst yourselves about these economic issues, labelling the root of all mess to population, attitude, red tapism etc. Probably its just MY point of view, but I feel that we have eventually given up discussing all this, let alone giving up on trying to do anything. This apathy to poverty that has developed over the period of n no of years is perhaps the reason why we feel don’t feel what Che or Mohan Bhargava feel. Or perhaps it is the larger issues related to religious fanatism that have occupied our antagonised souls. At the end of the day we realise that perhaps we ARE the selfish materialistic generation & care only about ourselves!
The two ride the weary old Norton 500 till they’ve to haplessly abandon it. They move from one place to another getting to know people, one hospital camp to other helping doctors. They go through being too broke to eat to times where they’re showered with food & money. The movie dwells over the fact that these two adventurers went out to completely soak into every bit of the lands & the people they crossed, which in a way, summarises the essence of travelling. What I learnt is that you do go to a place to ’be away’ from your current situation, but it is equally important to fully explore the place you go to. Unfortunately, given the time lines of only this many days per trip, we do envy all those wanderers blogging on travelblog.org who seem to be on a never ending trip several months together!