15 Years of 'Udaan': How Vikramaditya Motwane's Debut Is Coming of Age, Again

On a rainy night in 2010, I started walking after the late screening of a film whose title translated to “flight”. Nobody had heard of Udaan yet: a first-time director, two male television stars, a teen acting debut, an Anurag Kashyap co-writing credit. Like a cinephile high on discovery, I wanted to share my joy. I wanted to yell out my appreciation from Mumbai’s tarpaulin-covered rooftops. But I settled for jogging home, the cinema of my act rivalled only by the cinema of its young protagonist breaking free. I couldn’t wait to revisit this movie — to savour and dissect it, to make it my coming-of-age bible.

I never got around to doing that. Years passed. One tends to preserve the first impression of a film by refusing to distort its memory. Over time, I realised that it was something else. The film cut so deep that I couldn’t imagine having its courage. I had almost nothing in common with Udaan: no abusive dad, no dead mom, no half-brother I didn’t know of, no boarding-school past. Even the aspiration to write in Mumbai was belated in my case. There was nothing to resonate with. But that’s what great films do. They don’t just depict a lived-in and personal experience, they allow every new person to live through its experience. For those who related, Udaan was a flashback.

For those who didn’t, Udaan became life itself.

It’s easy to watch Vikramaditya Motwane’s debut 15 years later and call it a masterpiece. Or to conclude that Ronit Roy delivered one of the definitive Hindi performances of this century; or that its use of montages altered our perception of trauma and time; or that Amit Trivedi and Amitabh Bhattacharya locked in on the musical understanding of adolescence. Or to praise the simplicity of the plot: 17-year-old Rohan (Rajat Barmecha) returns to Jamshedpur and lives with his oppressive dad, Bhairav Singh (Roy), after being expelled from his Shimla boarding school. The my-house-my-rules man puts Rohan to work at his factory and enrols him into an engineering college. Just like that, his ‘childhood’ is over. Rohan also has to share his bedroom with little Arjun (Aayan Boradia), Bhairav’s son from a woman he married and presumably divorced in their eight years apart.

But Udaan’s legacy echoes the journey of its central character. One of the film’s triumphs is that Rohan’s ‘rebellion’ — his awakening — is not a packaged journey; it’s bereft of the hindsight that film-makers use when telling auto-fictional tales. The father is such a relentless bully that, as a viewer, you keep hoping for Rohan to avenge this humiliation and lash out like a wronged hero. But his resistance is earned; it’s slow and choppy, not showy, like a tractor jumping out of a field rather than a car picking up speed on a highway. The boy absorbs a lot of the man’s toxicity, trying to know him better before responding to his provocations. When he does react, it’s not an explosion so much as an epiphany.

This arc reflects how Udaan itself resisted the cultural landscape of the time: quietly, patiently, tenderly. None of its significance is backdated. The film became an antidote to an age in which Bollywood movies were defined by a reverence for flawed parents and elders with unlikely redemption arcs. It challenged the tropes of a conventional Indian patriarch: Bhairav Singh felt like a real-world and de-romanticised version of someone like Amitabh Bachchan in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham.... There is no changing for men like him, no transformations and tearful apologies — Udaan dared to strip away the idea of parenthood and show them as lonely, brutish people. It refuses to glorify his brokenness, reducing him to a survivor of his own demons and staging him as the future of a character that’d be the ‘troubled hero’ of a modern drama. It’s something Martin Scorsese would do with The Irishman, revealing the late-life stillness that followed the style and aggression of the mobsters we grew up in awe of.

When Rohan outsprints his dad in a chase towards the end, he becomes a manifestation of the film’s anti-message. He runs towards a premature manhood but away from a predestined one. He runs away from a compromised future but towards an uncertain one. The impact was subtle, but Udaan likely inspired a generation of small-town strivers to take the Mumbai plunge. In fact, ‘inspired’ is too lofty a term; it soothed them and normalised the language of grassroots dissent. It was a TVF (The Viral Fever) story before TVF existed: a silent catalyst for thousands of engineers who quit their hometowns, followed their calling, and started digital and comedy channels that specialised in making middle-Indian content about taking flight. Behind every other success story was an estranged parent — and a rare film like Udaan that exposed

their entitlement.

Udaan also thrives on the sort of observational detail that makes it more than a sensitive-poet story. For instance, when Rohan gets expelled, the air is heavy with the sense of an ending; it’s ripe with the wordless grief of leaving behind an age of innocence. The four friends bid farewell to each other in a way that urges the viewer to recognise that this is the final day of their adolescence; things will never be the same. To paraphrase a line from The Office, they didn’t know they were in the good old days until they left them. This happens ten minutes into the film, but you feel the void that accumulates from watching an hour. Later on, when Rohan decides to leave Jamshedpur and take up his friends’ offer to run a restaurant together in Mumbai, it sounds like a pipe dream that childhood buddies rarely follow through on. But in Udaan, their plan is not too naive to be true. It’s a licence out of purgatory, because a pipe dream is still a dream.

I like that Ram Kapoor’s role as Jimmy, Bhairav’s younger brother, goes beyond the cool-uncle prototype. He identifies with Rohan because he is aware of history repeating itself. But when he tries to convince the boy that Bhairav isn’t so bad, he sounds like he’s convincing himself; it’s a coping mechanism to rationalise his own choices and complicity in the making of their family. In little Arjun, though, he sees himself, and in Rohan he sees the older brother he wishes he had back when they used to get beaten up by their own father. When Rohan threatens to leave alone, Jimmy’s first reaction is to think of poor Arjun, the kid who didn’t ask for any of this, and the kid doomed to become another Jimmy. He can’t reverse the past, but he roots for Rohan to break the cycle of generational masculinity.

There are also the seniors that Rohan sneaks out to drink with every night. They look like a bunch of playful characters, but they themselves admit that they’re the ‘bad company’ that newbies like Rohan are warned about. Like the gang of Bostonites in Good Will Hunting, they hope that Rohan leaves them behind because he’s meant for bigger things; he cannot waste away like them. Appu (Anand Tiwari), the leader, is this brutally honest voice of reason. It’s moving to hear him narrate an anecdote about his abusive father and a mother who cursed Appu for ‘protecting’ her — all in chaste Bollywood references (Amjad Khan, Rakhee Gulzar, Muqaddar Ka Sikandar), as if he’s resenting the movies for lying to him about the consequences of courage. He seeks conflict like a drug because, in his head, he’s continuing the brawl he never finished with his dad.

Udaan allows these uncanny snatches of reality to supply its fiction. One of the best moments features a grumpy Bhairav being cajoled into hearing one of his son’s poems. When Rohan finishes, for a split-second, you can see that the man is surprised by how talented his boy is. But Bhairav never had the privilege of pursuing his own passion, so instead of enabling his son, his idea of parenting is to impose the same character-building limits on him. He’s almost jealous of Rohan for having a voice — discouraging, teasing and mocking him for being a virgin, and only being impressed when he discovers that Rohan smokes. Like many a ‘well-meaning’ Indian dad, his love language involves the simulation of hate; he validates his mistakes by training his children to carry them forward, not learn from them. I’d like to believe that their next ‘meeting’ happens at Bhairav Singh’s funeral, years down the line. Rohan reacts like he’s watched something special. He wants to share his joy and shout from the rooftops. But he settles for jogging in the rain, overwhelmed by memories that feel like his own but are someone else’s. He settles for writing his next poem — about the son who refused to set.