A public toilet becomes the contained outlet for the public’s rage in Bhed Bakri Bhoot, a 30-minute short helmed by Shivam Shankar. It all starts with a heartbreak. A jilted lover, a marriage-band player of everyone, scratches “Shalu I hate you” on the yellowing wall, as the trumpets of his paramour’s wedding procession blare the tale of his pain in the background. This wall becomes the writing slate of disses and desires. Everybody from a runaway bride stood up by her lover to a journalist quitting his job to an escaped convict, pens their opinion on the wall, venting out their frustrations.
Director: Shivam Shankar
Cast: Prasanna Bisht, Amit Tiwari Anand, Apeksha Iyer, and Vandana Joshi
Democracy gets attacked the most. It’s called a myth, a ghost, a sheep that is always “heard” (herd?), a d*** by the d****s for the d***s and a “foreign concept” by an uncle. Bhed Bakri Bhoot is an angry film, a note from the underground, a muffled scream of a choked country. We have seen it so often, the walls of public washrooms bearing phone numbers promising a good time. The walls of school toilets labelling that skirt-folding girl a slut. Indian washrooms are damp, dirty, cramped spaces where hygiene chokes to death but the populace’s unfiltered, problematic takes come to life. It says something about what we will not do or say in private and under the veil of anonymity.
Watching the short, I couldn’t help but draw parallels between the protagonist — the public toilet — and the discourse on social media, especially X (formerly Twitter). Somebody writes “Your hero is a mass murderer” on the wall, which could very well be a lone voice of dissent amid thousands worshipping a politician in the comments section of a PR-approved post. Each writing on the wall tempts another to put in a retort, becoming a game of Chinese Whispers where the original thought becomes an absurd message of anger, devoid of all meaning.
The anger is also the undoing of Bhed Bakri Bhoot. The intent is pure, the set-up is original, but the message feels overwritten. It’s fun to figure out where each character might be coming from as they find themselves inside this public washroom, running away from or towards something. But that too loses novelty after some point. The songs are bang on. A number about “Sharmaji ka beta” sums up what exactly has led us here. It’s the ideal boy, the ideal son, the ideal worker, who lets the bully, the fascist take charge. History is made by the defiers but the present is being written by conformists. And amid all this, the rest of us are just prisoners, writing on walls of our self-made jails.
