Imtiaz Ali Main Vaapas Aaunga Chronicles A Country In Danger Of Forgetting Itself

If one were to distil the nomadic worlds of Imtiaz Ali into a simple idea, it would come down to two things: stories and journeys. Across the ten films he has directed, these themes have resurfaced time and again, each time taking on a different form. Sometimes it is the journey of storytelling itself (Tamasha), and at others, the journey towards storytelling (Rockstar). Sometimes the journey becomes the story (Highway), while at other times, stories unfold across journeys (Love Aaj Kal).

Binding these journeys and stories together is a force that has always sat at the heart of Ali’s cinema: love. Love in all its unruly forms, unconditional, obsessive, reckless, transformative. His films have long followed people who are searching for meaning, belonging, or simply a way to become themselves. It feels fitting, then, that the filmmaker who has spent a lifetime chronicling lost souls in search of their stories has now turned his gaze towards a nation searching for its own. A nation trying to find itself in one of the most tragic moments of its history.

So when you meet the 95-year-old Keenu (a terrific Naseeruddin Shah) in Main Vaapas Aaunga, a man longing for a lost love, a lost time, a lost life, and desperate to return to all three, you are immediately reminded of Veera (Alia Bhatt) from Highway. At one point in the film, staring at the mountains, she tells Mahabir (Randeep Hooda) that they are calling her. Keenu, too, is being called. Not by the mountains, but by the mustard-yellow fields of an undivided Punjab that refuse to leave his memory. These are the same fields that Ali has returned to time and again, the fields he evokes in the closing moments of Rockstar, the fields through which Ved (Ranbir Kapoor) and Tara (Deepika Padukone) wander in the early stretches of Tamasha. After all, in Ali’s cinema, landscapes are rarely just landscapes. They, eventually, are repositories of memory, desire, and longing. Quite similarly, in Ali’s films, love is rarely contained within people. It very much spills into the sky, into the sea, into the body itself.

So, when the young Keenu (Vedang Raina) etches Afsana’s (Sharvari) name onto his hand, it feels like another variation of a familiar Ali motif. You think of Harry (Shah Rukh Khan) standing before the sea and screaming Sejal’s (Anushka Sharma) name, (meaning river water), into the waves. You think of Ved looking up at the stars when he misses Tara. You think of Aditya (Shahid Kapoor) in Jab We Met, naming a project after Geet (Kareena Kapoor).

Because, again, after all, Ali’s characters spend their lives longing for their lovers, returning again and again to their names, as though saying them might somehow bring them closer. And then there is the confusion, the restlessness, the existential ache that has long defined Ali’s protagonists. Keenu, even after a lifetime of living, finds himself wrestling with questions of belonging and identity. In many ways, he belongs to the same lineage of lost souls that has populated Ali’s cinema for two decades.

Transit, in Main Vaapas Aaunga, is no longer necessarily a vehicle for self-discovery. It is, in fact, very much, a condition for survival. And this is where Ali returns to one of the central preoccupations of his cinema: storytelling itself. An ageing Keenu, lying on his deathbed, feels less like a protagonist and more like an old grandfather determined to pass on a story before it disappears forever. A story of a time when plurality stood on the brink of polarisation. A story of a love slowly corroded by the machinery of hate. A story about yesterday, but one that speaks directly to today.

This is where what begins as a personal story expands into something larger, into something deeply affective. Ali understands that love is not simply an emotion but a form of inheritance. If the people who carried love through the most difficult of times disappear, and their stories disappear with them, what remains for times such as ours is not remembrance, but resentment. It is fitting, then, that Keenu spends much of the film battling memory loss.

His struggle is not simply to remember a lost love; it is to preserve a way of seeing the world before it vanishes. His fading memory becomes a metaphor for a society losing touch with its own humanity. As Keenu struggles to remember, the film asks whether a nation can do the same? Whether it can recover a memory buried beneath years of division and distrust. Because, what Keenu fears losing is not just Afsana, but the world in which Afsana was possible. And in trying to remember her, he is also trying to remember a country that is in danger of forgetting itself.