Arjun Varain Singh’s directorial debut heralds the arrival of a fresh voice in Indian cinema
By Ishita Sengupta
It is a Sunday night and you are recovering from the weekend. You remember little of it. You had stepped out, there were friends and acquaintances. At some point the loud music of the pub had drowned out all attempts of conversation. You look outside. Today is a new day and your legs hurt. You sit on the couch and decide to watch something. Kho Gaye Hum Kahan, the newest drop on Netflix, appears on screen. You want to give it a chance without distraction. The phone is pushed away – far but not too far – and the film begins. It is easy to follow. There are three friends and they live in Mumbai. The music is fun and the visual aesthetic is that of an Instagram filter. Suddenly your attention wavers. You look at your phone and drag it to your side even though it is the phone that is dragging you. Your finger involuntarily starts swiping on the screen. A minute or twenty later you look up and find a character in the film doing the same thing. As if she can see you.
Arjun Varain Singh’s directorial debut is a curious outing that watches you watching it. This reversal of gaze is disconcerting, as if the screen separating the reel from the real is hollow. The characters seem to be mimicking you — both in actions and in words. When someone in the film plunges into Instagram right after a break-up only to figure out that her indecisive ex is in fact dating someone else based on some likes and comments, the moment hangs your personal shame and validates it. When a middle-class gym instructor naively assumes that wearing high-end sneakers like his affluent patrons will make him one of them, it confirms a mirage peddled in the digital era that equality is a grid-sized reality.
Broadly speaking, Kho Gaye Hum Kahan unfolds attuned to the enormous role social media has come to play in our lives. It outlines the extent to which virtual reality has infiltrated the tangibility of the present. This itself makes it a rare venture in the Hindi-language storytelling landscape where social media is often deployed for effect with little understanding. Take for instance Sudhir Mishra’s 2023 film, Afwah where digital platforms were included in the plot for the most basic purpose: to make a video viral. Ditto for Anurag Kashyap’s Almost Pyaar with DJ Mohabbat (2023).
But more specifically, Singh’s film is about those who are most hooked to the digital reality and more prone to the loneliness that spawns from it: the youth. Kho Gaye Hum Kahan centers on three friends, Ahana Singh (Ananya Panday), Imaad Ali (Siddhant Chaturvedi) and Neil Pereira (Adarsh Gourav), and the way they navigate their lives through the messiness of their age. All of them are in their mid-20s and, the outing insists, more susceptible to being lost than being loved.
Hindi films, and by extension pop culture, have a way of depicting youth: through naivete. Young people are mostly treated with a specific disdain like they are one breath away from making a reckless decision and one step into taking a call that would ruin their lives forever. Most narratives unravel with a wisdom that refuses to look at young people for who they are and restrict their gaze to who they can be: unruly, disobedient and inclined to learn their lessons at the end. Ravi Chopra’s 2003 film, Baghban, revolving around an elderly couple and their four ungrateful sons refusing to take care of them, cemented its cult status by affirming this reading. More recently, Vikas Bahl’s Goodbye (2022) reiterated the guilt trip most makers induce on young people. The film opens with a young lawyer missing the many calls from her mother (she was partying, what else?) only to receive the news the next day that the latter has passed away.
This incomprehensibility to understand the age extends to portraying it in excess. Over the years certain shorthands have come to imbue the representation of young people– a cigarette in hand, a cuss word in mouth, defiance in the head. Not Kho Gaye Hum Kahan. Singh’s film is forever alert to the vulnerabilities of youth but never weaponises them as lessons that the characters need to learn from. This is not to say that they don’t gain insights.
After a messy break-up, Ahana goes far and beyond (post thirst-traps on Instagram) to win her ex back only to realize the redundancy of doing it in the first place. During the runtime of the film, Neil, a gym instructor and more sorted of the three, is confronted with a cruel realization that he might not be as upright as he thought himself to be. The emotionally inert Imaad, who is a stand-up comic and more willing to make everyone else a punchline to avoid looking within, tackles his personal demons. And all three of them reckon with the fact that living for the ‘gram has made them a little lost. Granted these resolutions are a little too neat but it is worth acknowledging that the characters arrive at these conclusions on their own and not through the intervention of a ‘well-meaning adult’.
Singh not just designs the narrative around three young people but informs the writing with what youth is: a crystal ball of possibilities. In the film, Neil dreams of opening his own studio. Over a discussion his other friends pitch in. Ahana, the only one with the management degree, decides to quit her job and join Neil. Imaad, more well-off than both of them, chooses to put the initial funding. In any other film this endeavor would have crashed as a failure and underlined the follies of young people to take decisions. Kho Gaye Hum Kahan concludes with all three of them celebrating the opening of the Neil’s gym accompanied by their parents, hinting ever so lightly that youth is not wasted on the young.
It is a Sunday night and the new film you were watching has been on pause for an hour. Outside your window, the sun has set and darkness has set in. You remember telling yourself not to get distracted but the resolve broke soon. Was it the cat video? Was it the message from your friend asking to choose the dress she should buy? You can no longer remember. The phone is still in your hand and it is warm. On the screen, the characters have been frozen for a while. But there is no hurry. They are waiting for you to look up. They get you because they see you.