One thing that constantly reverberates in the movie: Gandhi My Father is the eyes of Akshay Khanna (Harilal: Gandhi’s son) which very innocuously communicates hankering of a hug wrapped in a goblet of anger served to the not-so-publicly-doting father.

One scene that particularly stayed with me was when Harilal (Akshay Khanna) comes running behind the train to give his mother an orange that he took from a vendor, and asks her specifically to eat it and not share it with anyone and gives Bapu, a dejected look. That orange was a rare symbolism in the movie of the latent (yet public), anger disappointment and despair that Harilal had from Bapu for not being there for him in situations when he needed him the most, berserk blame that he etched on his father for letting him being a failure and not picking him up like usually other parents would do.

This inertia of emotions also arose from the anger that originated because of the constant proverbial shadow that is cast upon his own identity by his surname and his own personal debacles of life.

Akshay Khanna has been meticulous in emoting the layers of a son lurking for his father’s love, attention and much needed support during periods of turmoil in life. His failures in life were a result of perhaps lack of guidance, support, harshness, and somewhere high moral and ethical ground of Mahatma and lack of personal character traits in Harilal as well.

There is one very interesting part in the movie, which perhaps will make sense to teens and young adults, that throughout the movie, Gandhi kept asking Harilal to join him and his struggle but he never asked his son, what battle he wanted to pick in his own life? Never made him decide for himself and that’s why perhaps his character couldn’t develop and therefore, things were the way they were for him.

There is another moment in the movie when AK comes drunk to meet his mother at the Ashram. Ba (played by Shefali Shah) weeps insatiably on the deplorable and somewhat hapless condition of his eldest son and Shefali Shah has communicated every inch of emotions of a worrying and a doting mother for the dilapidated state, his son is in.

Gandhi: My father makes you peep the story from Bapu’s angle as well. It tells you that in the fight for your rights, if you have to sacrifice your family, then let it be. But how much sacrifice is justified, is more of a moral question to each one of us, weighted by the relativity of importance of family we have in our lives. But what can justify sacrifice to the extent, that a kid like Harillal, became a lost jewel?

Overall, Gandhi: My father is a cinema of A-Quality, with great acting, and cinematography, a little patchy screenplay, but still managing to produce a good product for the audience. A must watch
if good cinema grips you!!