Life depends on the liver and the believer. Both, life and belief, have many lies in them. A mentor once told me to start my stories after the third drink. I was too drunk to fully understand the gravity of what he meant, but it made instinctive sense. Of late, life has felt like being thrown into a battlefield bootcamp - as if I’m being trained to face the severest of conditions it might throw at me. What if the coffee powder runs out? What if the buckets aren’t washed on time? What if the bathroom light is left on? Other such devastating possibilities that could easily escalate into a hostage situation.
I love music, especially rhythm. I get visibly annoyed when it’s disrupted. The same mentor, on the other hand, hates almost everything I love. He is a sucker for disruption, borderline fatalism - that’s his storytelling style. Once, I asked him why nobody in his films lives happily ever after. Why do they all die, or suffer irreversible losses, or walk away scarred beyond repair?
“Well,” he said, “isn’t that how life plays out?”
I nodded.
The question that stayed with me later was this: why did Sriram Raghavan choose to make Ikkis?
It felt like the antithesis of everything he had stood for so far. No whodunit. No suspense about how or why. No mystery about consequences. Everything was out there — in the public domain, in the trailer. On the surface, no familiar Sriram Raghavan stamp in sight.
Then I watched the film.
And came back changed.
Baptised by fire.
Somewhere in that experience, I found an answer to another question altogether: why did I choose to be me? Thank you, sir.
Did I love Ikkis? Hell yes.
Did it move me? Absolutely... I cried.
Did I understand why Sriram sir made Ikkis? Directly, yes. Through its layers... hmmm... perhaps.
I felt he was reaching out to Husna - the lost beloved who has moved to a proverbial Multan, while the seeker remains frozen at the threshold. The almost-named. The unattainable. The excuse we blame on fate when we cannot move on.
Husna could be anybody. Or anything. A person, a memory, a country, an idea, a belief. A metaphor - depending on how much faith you have in such readings. Personally, I felt Ikkis was about parallel searches; each main character chasing their own Husna. Seen through that lens, the film made deeper emotional sense to me than the literal events unfolding on the battlefield.
The motherland.
A muse.
A beloved.
Husna.
Who knows? Who can tell? And really, who is to nitpick technicalities in a Sriram Raghavan film? I found it pitch-perfect in every department.
I remember Sriram sir once saying at a writers’ conference that one should make films only after turning forty, because by then, you’ve seen enough of life, death, and everything in between. I agree, to tell a good story without sounding like you’re just ikkis one must know most of the major beats.
Making Ikkis in a time like this felt deliberate. Calm. Almost defiant. A choice made not to provoke, but to stand still and look inward.
And for those who walked in expecting loud, chest-thumping jingoistic nationalism, Dhurandhar is still playing in theatres, and Border 2 is just around the corner.
RIP Dharamji.
Jai Sriram.
Cheers.
