Shabd

Story:

Shabd is a 2005 Indian Hindi-language psychological art film produced by Pritish Nandy Communications, and directed by Leena Yadav. It stars Sanjay Dutt, Aishwarya Rai and Zayed Khan. The film got good reviews but performed below expectations at the box office, despite being profitable. The story is adapted from the critically acclaimed Malayalam film Rachana released in 1983.

PLOT

Author Shaukat Vashisht lives a wealthy lifestyle in India with his wife, Antra, who is a lecturer. Shaukat achieves fame when he is nominated for the Booker Prize and goes on to win it. His publishers, hoping that they have unleashed a goldmine, are disappointed with his subsequent works, and soon Shaukat is depressed to such an extent that he almost gives up writing. Then he decides to write a story about a woman named Tamanna and figures that he will base this story on none other than Antara herself. For this purpose, he starts to make note of her every movement, and it is then that he finds out that she has an admirer in fellow teacher, Yash Agnihotri, a dashing young man with a bright future ahead of him. Shaukat also finds out that Antara has never mentioned Yash to him, nor has she informed Yash that she is married.

He decides to manufacture a realistic story by making Antara hide her marital status from Yash and pursue a relationship with him. Things go wrong as Antara begins to have real feelings for Yash, even though she still loves Shaukat.

Whatever Shaukat pens turns out to be true. He starts to believe he can change Antara’s and Yash’s fates by his writings and writes according to his logic that Yash would commit suicide after learning the truth about Antara’s. But Antara soon discovers this. She lies to Shaukat that Yash really committed suicide in order to disillusion Shaukat. Shaukat, out of guilt, becomes schizophrenic. The film ends on a disturbing note: Antara sends Shaukat to an asylum due to his schizophrenia.