There’s a popular saying that goes, ‘Winners Focus on Winning, Losers Focus on Winners’. Most of us are raised in surroundings where we are always taught to win and compete for the highest position in any aspect of life. In the Hindi language, a famous phrase for this is ‘Jeet Ke Aana’ meaning ‘do win and come’. This has subconsciously accustomed us to behave in such a manner in public.
However, in recent times, this notion of ‘emerging as winners at the end of everything’ is being challenged by several filmmakers of Hindi cinema, popularly known as Bollywood. Whenever we watch a film depicting tournaments or competitions, we always anticipate that at the end of the movie, the protagonists will eventually win, leading us to a happy ending. However, many films like ‘ABCD 2’ (2015), a movie based on the real-life story of a dance crew from Mumbai, proved our assumptions wrong. The film beautifully conveyed that it is natural to experience failure. It emphasized the imperativeness of completing the task at hand rather than focusing on results. A similar story is depicted in ‘Chhichhore’(2019), a movie about an engineering college’s boys’ hostel where the residents were termed as ‘losers’ because they couldn’t win their annual sports tournament. Despite Anni (played by the actor late Shushant Singh Rajput) and his team’s earnest efforts to win that year’s tournament, they lost by a close margin. However, what truly mattered was the effort and determination they invested to win the tournament against all odds, a feat acknowledged even by their opponents.
Another web series that especially prompted me to write this article is ‘POTLUCK’ Season 2 (streaming on SonyLiv). Based on the love stories of a family titled the ‘Shastris’, the character playing the role of the family’s mother, Pammi, decides to participate in a local beauty pageant competition. Even after sorting out everything well in advance, she accidentally breaks her hand which makes her unable to perform the talent round. Even though she lost the pageant, it was her resilience and confidence that made the series worth watching.
There are numerous such examples of movies and web series highlighting that a happy ending need not be always about winning. The crux of this write-up is that we live in a world where we are constantly involved in a ‘rat race’. We are always running to cross the finishing line first and when we fail to do so, we feel our world-shattering, with all efforts going into vain. But the silver lining in every journey is what we have learned, and what we have achieved in the process. Thus, films like these play a significant role in setting a fresh narrative that even a failure can sometimes teach us the biggest life lessons which, unlike the momentary happiness of winning, will stay with us forever.