Category: Literature

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Title of the Movie: Red Rose

Director: Bharathiraja (as Bharathi Rajaa)

Story By: Bharathiraja (as Bharathi Rajaa)

Starring: Rajesh Khanna, Poonam Dhillon, Satyen Kappu, Om Shivpuri, Shammi, Shashi Kiran, Ram Sethi, Jezebel, and Mayur Verma

Release Date: May 23rd, 1980 (Whole of India) and June 6th, 1980 (Mumbai only)

Country: India

Language: Hindi

Age Group: AS & A Level and IBDP grades (16 to 18 years of age)

Genre: Thriller/Horror/Suspense/Psychological Crimes

IBDP and IGCSE Subjects Covered: Sociology, Psychology, Global Perspectives and Research, Thinking Skills, and Social & Cultural Anthropology

Review Written By: Fiza Pathan

Introduction

‘Ho o aankhe jaame sharab hain

Gaal yeh laal gulaab hain.

ओ आंखे जामे शराब हैं

गाल यह लाल गुलाब हैं|

Those eyes are goblets of wine,

These cheeks are red roses.’

Song ‘Tere Bina Jeena Kya’ from the Bollywood movie Red Rose (1980), lyricist Vithalbhai Patel

The Bollywood psychological suspenseful thriller cum horror movie titled ‘Red Rose’ and starring Bollywood’s first superstar Rajesh Khanna, or Kaka as most Indians lovingly call him, is based loosely on the terrifying real crime stories of Raman Raghav of Mumbai and Ted Bundy of America. Raman Raghav is even mentioned by name at the end of the movie by the police inspector who, at last, enters the home of Rajesh Khanna or Anand and finds among other things, the dead bodies of numerous women slain by Anand or Rajesh Khanna or Kaka during the three years of his frightful killing spree. Strangely enough, every time Anand would kill his female victim, he would then, with the aid of his gardener, bury her body in his garden and over the grave plant a beautiful red rose, which would then grow into a rose bush. This is typical of a paranoid schizophrenia patient who tries to cover the brutality of his crime by beautifying it. It is his way of trying to justify his heinous acts or brutal crimes, and this artistic choice can be analysed as a cognitive defence mechanism studied at the IB Diploma Program level in Psychology.

Thus enters the motif of the red rose, or ‘lal gulab’, which is a crucial motif in this movie directed by Bharathiraja and produced by M.P. Jain and Ravi Kumar. It is, among other things, the defence mechanism Anand, or Kaka, uses to shade the ‘blackness’ of his crime with a ‘red’ that depicts the passion and true love of a female figure in his life, something he never had during his traumatic childhood. Like America’s Ted Bundy, Anand goes on a killing spree for three years, and like Raman Raghav, he suffers from a chronic case of paranoid schizophrenia due to childhood trauma.

As we all know, Raman Raghav was the homicidal maniac of the roaring 1960s in Mumbai and on its outskirts who used to kill his roadside victims or pavement dwellers with a blunt iron bar. After coming into police custody, he then revealed to the team of psychiatrists who were investigating the motives of his mania about his sad and traumatic childhood. Like Anand, Raghav, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, exhibited a total lack of a ‘moral compass.’ This aligns with IBDP Psychology’s focus on the aetiology of abnormal behaviour, which is often required in its syllabus. But the movie Red Rose is also loosely based on the life of Ted Bundy, America’s serial killer.

Ted Bundy was the notorious but extremely charming and handsome serial killer of America. His killing spree went on for three years like Anand’s, and even after being caught, the people in court viewing Bundy on national television could not believe their eyes to see that the charming and very upper American middle-class looking gentleman sitting before them in handcuffs was the notorious, infamous, and much-hated serial killer of the USA.

Ted too had a traumatic childhood where he realised that the woman he called his elder sister was in fact his mother, and the two ‘parents’ who had raised him were actually his grandparents, who had kept the secret of his birth from him. Rumours were that Ted was probably the offspring of his mother and his maternal grandfather, that is, an offspring of incest, which added more fuel to the fire of his childhood trauma, but through my investigations, I have found out that that angle was just not true. In fact, what was true was that Ted showed from childhood a sort of sadistic tendency to want to inflict pain on people and to ‘undress’ little girls younger than him, or rather those who were taken in by his charm and then were lured into dark forests to do his sadistic sexual bidding. A female cousin of his even recalls having once stayed at the Bundy home and having awoken in the morning, surrounded by sharp kitchen knives pointed at her. She declares that she was aware that Ted had been behind the act, but what creeped the poor woman out was that she did not wake up at all while he not only entered her bedroom but also surrounded her completely with numerous sharpened kitchen knives! This indicates that it was not a spontaneous ‘practical joke’ but a well-thought-out and sadistic act on Ted Bundy’s part, and that this occurred when Bundy was a mere child in junior school.

However, Ted Bundy did not, like Raman or Anand, suffer from paranoid schizophrenia. He instead was diagnosed with a number of personality disorders like Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD), Psychopathy, Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), Bipolar Disorder (Manic Depression), Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), Paraphilic Disorders like, as I have illustrated before, sexual sadism and that disturbing necrophilia and lastly Addictive Disorder which would in his case be pornography addiction. He, unlike Raghav and our Anand, did not have ‘a lack of a moral compass’ but instead, as a typical ASPD patient, displayed a pattern of manipulating, exploiting, or violating the rights of others without remorse. That is partially what Kaka did in the movie ‘Red Rose’, he used his charm and good looks like Bundy to lure young women into his ‘trap’. Anand would lure women towards him and then kill them on the night they had sexual intercourse together for the first time. Bundy, on the other hand, used various forms of torture, sodomization, incessant rape, etc., before killing his victims, and then tended to have sexual intercourse with the dead body of the woman he had killed constantly, even days and weeks after the body had started decomposing. This explains the necrophilia diagnosis that I mentioned, which drove his violent sexual fantasies and post-mortem rituals.

Anand or Kaka would not have had necrophilic tendencies, but he exhibits a pervasive pattern of violating others’ rights, deceitfulness, and a complete lack of remorse. Thus, his mask of normality by maintaining a successful business while hiding a ‘room of horrors’ is a classic symptom of high-functioning psychopathy, which I mentioned earlier as one of the diagnosed personality disorders of Ted Bundy as well. The film ‘Red Rose’, however, justifies Anand’s misogyny through a childhood trauma involving a ‘woman with a bra’ who falsely accused him of rape. An IBDP Psychology student can analyse this through the lens of maladaptive learning and how early environmental interactions shape violent adult identities.

However, in turn, the AS & A Level Sociology student may then put forward the point to the above ‘justification’ of the misogyny of Anand sociologically as ossified misogyny, implying that forward or independent women were the ones who triggered Anand’s murderous rage always. Such a Sociology student of the AS and A Level can analyse this as a social commentary on the conservative anxieties of 1980s India regarding women’s lib under the Feminist Perspective of Sociological Analysis.

So, as you can see, if I could really analyse Kaka’s movie from an IBDP and AS & A Level context across all 23 subjects, I could adequately and confidently teach any International Board student worldwide – I think this movie review would turn into a thesis. This is because the movie ‘Red Rose’, based on the original 1978 Tamil movie titled ‘Sigappu Rojakkal’ by Bharathi Rajaa (again!), was an educational content-rich film for higher grade students of not only the AS & A Level and IBDP level but also any college student doing their Bachelor’s degree in Filming or Filmography. It would be foolish for anyone to state that Hindi or even Indian Regional Cinema does not produce IBDP and AS & A Level rich content and matter to study, analyse, and use one’s critical thinking skills to solve the many erudite ‘riddles’ of this movie. While doing so, one can even employ the AS & A Level subject of Thinking Skills to this part of the analysis, yet another subject that I am adept at and can teach effectively to any student globally.

Thus, the movie ‘Red Rose’ will be analysed in this blog post in the light of the many Psychological, Sociological, Social and Cultural Anthropological, and Global Perspective elements contained in the many layers of this ‘riddle’ of a film, which then I shall decode for you using some topics related to the AS & A Level subject of Thinking Skills.

These elements can be used for critical analytical studies on this film in comparison with the Kamal Haasan and Sridevi starrer ‘Sigappu Rojakkal’, which was a success compared to the Kaka starrer. If you are wondering why this film in the Hindi version did not live up to the expectations of the Tamil version, then the main reason would be a blend of the charm of Kaka and a Sociological topic termed as the ‘Super-star construct’. From a Media Studies perspective (a sub-topic in AS & A Level Sociology), the film’s failure at the box office was due to the audience’s refusal to accept their Romantic Superstar, Rajesh Khanna, as a ‘deranged lunatic.’ This demonstrates how social expectations of celebrity icons act as a form of informal social control. Well, this was at least so only in the epic 1980s in India.

On the topic of homicide of such a nature and childhood trauma, I would simply state that, however troublesome, horrifying, violent, and unfair your childhood was, that does not give you the leave and license to act like an animal in another person’s life. Because you can’t compare the sorrows of one another, or as in Christianity we put it, the Crosses of one another. You were made to only carry your cross, and no one else can carry your cross; neither can you be able to carry another person’s cross, or rather be strong enough to carry the burden of another suffering soul. And only you can release yourself from your own hell of carrying the hate of another with you; and no one else can help you in the bargain. In that case alone, I will briefly focus in this review on the NEP 2020 IKS Policy topic of the concept of ‘Atman’ and the Shadow as shown in the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. Hindu Philosophy suggests the Atman (Soul) is pure, but it can be clouded by the Ahankara (Ego). Anand’s ego is so bloated by his perceived superiority and his so-called right to judge and kill women that he has completely lost touch with his Atman. He is a soul trapped in a so-called ‘hell’ of his own making, which aligns with the philosophical idea that heaven and hell are states of mind experienced here on Earth, especially evident in Ancient Hindu Philosophy, which I teach effectively and expertly at the International Level (IB/IGCSE).

I could have gone on to analyse ‘Red Rose’ and especially the character of Anand on the NEP IKS 2020 Policy topics in Category 1 (in which I am an expert, that is the COMPLETE HINDU PHILOSOPHY) like the Three Gunas (Attributes of Nature) where in the Sankhya school of Hindu philosophy, every individual is a mix of three Gunas, and one can analyse Anand’s character through their imbalance; or I could have focussed on the Maya and the ‘Mithya’ (Illusion vs. Reality) topic where now the red rose itself now becomes a ‘maya’ (and not just a literary or artistic motif) or symbol of Maya or illusion. In the film, the rose represents beauty, romance, and Rajesh Khanna’s Superstar image. However, philosophy teaches that the material world is Mithya (relatively real but deceptive). The bloody rose image I created with Google AI’s help above thus serves as a perfect philosophical metaphor: the beautiful exterior is an illusion that hides the grim, bloody reality of Anand’s actions.

Then the profound Hindu Philosophical richness of the red roses dripping with blood is also shown throughout the film, making perfect sense. I could have even focused on the fact that Hindu philosophy places great weight on Sanskaras — (a really critical topic in the NEP 2020 IKS Policy topics) and that the mental impressions left by past actions or traumas. Anand’s or Kaka’s sociopathy is triggered by a traumatic ‘imprint’, as it were, from his youth (the false accusation with the girl with the open bra), and then, from a philosophical standpoint, his inability to process this trauma leads to a cycle of Adharma (unrighteousness). His killings are a futile attempt to then ‘cleanse’ as it were his past, but they only deepen his karmic debt, eventually leading to his inevitable downfall – but I have no time for that as I wish to only focus on the Atman (Soul) is pure, but it can be clouded by the Ahankara (Ego) aspect – otherwise this movie review will really become a thesis of sorts!

‘धर्माधर्माविद्वांसो मन्दाः पश्यन्ति चक्षुषा।

क्रोधाद्भवति सम्मोहः सम्मोहात्स्मृतिविभ्रमः॥

स्मृतिभ्रंशाद्बुद्धिनाशो बुद्धिनाशात्प्रणश्यति॥

krodhād bhavati sammohaḥ sammohāt smṛti-vibhramaḥ |

smṛti-bhraṁśād buddhi-nāśo buddhi-nāśāt praṇaśyati ||

From anger comes delusion; from delusion, loss of memory; from loss of memory, the destruction of discrimination (Buddhi); from the destruction of discrimination, he perishes.’

–The Bhagavad Gita 2.63

‘काममाश्रित्य दुष्पूरं दम्भमानमदान्विताः।

मोहाद्गृहीत्वासद्ग्राहान्प्रवर्तन्तेऽशुचिव्रताः॥

kāmam āśritya duṣpūraṁ dambha-māna-madānvitāḥ |

mo hād gṛhītvāsad-grāhān pravartante ’śuci-vratāḥ ||

Giving themselves over to insatiable desire, full of hypocrisy, pride, and arrogance, holding wrong views through delusion, they act with impure resolves.’

–The Bhagavad Gita 16.10

Red Rose Movie Plot

A young minor kitchen boy wakes Kaka, or Anand, from his deep slumber. There is a breakfast tray in the young kitchen boy’s hands with two cups of early morning tea or chai. When the boy’s gaze is directed quizzically to the other side of Anand’s bed, indicating that the young boy wished to know whether the ‘woman of the night’ or Anand’s ‘latest female flame’ wanted tea that morning, along with Anand. Anand has his tea and, with a nonchalant non-verbal gesture, simply indicates to the boy that the woman would no longer be visiting them, and so, obviously, that morning would not take her breakfast tea. Obviously, we realise the indication that Anand had killed the poor woman with his knife the previous night while he had sex with her. But this we only surmise after we see the complete film. The kitchen boy, merely confused, nods his head and takes away the breakfast tray. We realise that Anand lives alone in a palatial house, surrounded by a number of old and faithful servants, such as the creepy gardener and the perpetually perplexed main gatekeeper. However, we notice that the kitchen boy is a new member of the household. In fact, there is always a new kitchen boy in that palatial house. Anand, during the process of getting ready to go to his office, where he works as a millionaire industrialist and business tycoon, dismisses the young kitchen boy from his services on the pretext that the boy was a minor and should not have been working in the first place as support staff in someone’s mansion, but should have been studying at school. He arranges for the boy to be admitted to a good school right up until the boy’s graduation, and then asks his servants to secure a new kitchen boy for his mansion. This seems like a very simple element in the plot to indicate Anand’s benevolence, but it also suggests that Anand would change the kitchen worker in his household every time he killed a ‘wife’ or woman in his bed. This was because the woman, or ‘wife’, would always work in the kitchen, as most housewives did in India during the 1980s, and would therefore become very familiar with the kitchen boy. To prevent the kitchen staff member from being able to tell on Anand later, Anand preferred to change his kitchen staff every time he committed a killing. He is now heading to his office, where he starts his usual procedure of selecting a secretary or personal stenographer for his private office. He chooses a woman who is independent-spirited, promiscuous, sexually liberated, unmarried, a person who has worked in several companies as a stenographer but is indeed a rolling stone that gathers no moss, is beautiful, seductive, wears bold western clothing, and does not mind having multiple sexual relationships at the same time, and adores partying. Anand beds this woman and kills her while doing so with the knife he procures from the knife stand above his double-bed headboard. He then gets his gardener to bury the body of the woman in Anand’s spacious garden, and the gardener then grows a red rose over the grave of the woman in place. However, on that same day when Anand selects the liberated woman for his next homicidal escapade, he accidentally encounters a very beautiful young woman who worked as a salesgirl in a nearby Clothing Stall called Roopsaga. Her name is Sharda, played by Poonam Dhillon, and she is a virginal-looking young twenty-something woman, dressed in a simple and modest salwar-kameez, is soft-spoken, shy, hard-working, is not a seductress, is, however, ethereally beautiful, not much given to sex, is extremely God-fearing, and is the typical idea of the ideal Indian wife. It is this Sharda that Anand thinks of luring into his homicidal trap next, but inadvertently, he starts to fall in love with the nymph-like Sharda. Her simplicity, her modesty, her lack of agency, lack of sexual prowess, and her total dependency on Anand make him fall deeply in love with her, making it difficult for him to even contemplate killing her. In trying to get Sharda out on a date, he also inadvertently manages to lure another independent and loud-spoken single woman, Sheela, played by Aruna Irani, into his homicidal sexual trap, where he kills her like all his other female victims, and then he and his gardener buries her too in the garden, and places a red rose above her unmarked grave. Nevertheless, Anand marries Sharda at last when he realises that she would not go to bed with him unless he became her husband. He tries on the first night of their marriage to keep on coaxing Sharda to sleep with him at once, but Sharda seems more interested, as the new wife of a vast household, to meet and greet all the members of the same as well as to visit every room in the palatial home. This takes a lot of time as the house is truly a vast mansion, and it is only quite at the dead of night that Sharda and Anand make it to their own bedroom. However, before they can bed each other, a call comes from the office to Anand informing him that the brother of the independent stenographer he had just murdered had arrived at his office and was investigating the sudden disappearance of his promiscuous sister. This frightens Anand and even puts him on alert, making him want to leave home at once for the office, which he does, leaving his nuptial night with Sharda incomplete. Sharda makes herself at home in Anand’s palatial house as the days go by. She, however, realises that there are no other family members living in the mansion but only a few faithful and very aged servants, most of whom behaved in a very creepy and off-putting manner. She also realises that Anand’s father was still quite alive but was deranged and disturbed in the mind after a court case that had gone wrong for him. He, therefore, instead of actually living in the actual mansion, stays in the attached servant’s quarters, never emerging from there, while food and drink on a daily basis were taken to him by the creepy gardener alone, as he remained in his self-imposed isolation. Sharda also learns from some neighbourhood children that, before her, there had been another ‘bride’, ‘wife’, or ‘woman of the house’, and they had no clue where this other woman had gone or who she was. While Sharda puzzled over all these perplexing matters, she was, unbeknownst to her, being stalked by the house’s gardener, who had also planted a hidden camera in her bathroom. When Sharda was bathing in the tub, the camera captured her, as did footage of her undressing in her bedroom. The video camera would then be taken by the gardener to the father of Anand, played by Satyen Kappu, in his isolation, where he and the lewd gardener would watch Sharda naked from salaciously. This was the same procedure they had adopted for all the women who entered Anand’s life and bedroom, and it was well known to Anand. They even watched when Anand would kill the woman he was bedding. Sharda, on one such stormy night, sees a horrible sight. She sees a ghoulish hand emerge from one of the rose bushes with claws and tentacles while water spurts forth from deep within the grave in which the ghoul was buried. Sharda screams hysterically, but no one in the house comes to her rescue. She ducks for cover into the forbidden room that Anand had warned her never to enter, and there, she sees another horrid sight. She realises that this room is a room of horrors. The room is empty except for a female skeleton strung up at the far end of the room, a number of white brassieres arranged one behind the other towards the right of the skeleton, and the whitewashed walls of the room scribbled upon with a number of pens in a harried manner, in the hand of a man who was mentally disturbed. The handwriting is that of Anand’s, and upon the walls of that room, he narrates his sad beginnings and how his childhood trauma led him to kill women in his own bed while being watched by his father and gardener in the servants’ quarters. The writing on the wall reveals the story of a teenage boy, Anand, played by Master Mayur, who is now the Bollywood actor Mayur Verma. This boy was carefree, innocent, hardworking, sincere, and very childlike. He was also very oversensitive and highly unaware of all matters related to sex. He was born in a poor farming village to rural buffalo herders. He was brutally beaten and thrust out of his home by his own mother because of his negligence in the fields. He then, on his travels, comes across a humble and generous middle-class family who is willing to keep him on as a servant boy so that he can get food, shelter, and a job to keep him going. Soon, he becomes an integral part of this middle-class household and settles in well. However, the middle-aged couple of the middle-class household who had taken him on had a young high-school-going daughter who was given to reading erotica and other pornographic material. She also often masturbated, but felt the urge one day to have sex with a real boy of her age for once. She realized then that the young Anand was quite a handsome and winsome-looking teenage boy with a strong body, which she hankered after. She lured him one day into the inner part of the house for some alleged work, and instead undid her brassiere and tried to seduce him to touch her without the brassiere on. The sight of her unhooked white brassiere shocked the otherwise child-like and very sensitive young Anand, and he covered his eyes in shame, but stood stock-still in place, not knowing what to do. The girl, unable to seduce the young Anand to touch her of her own accord, started to hug him and cling to him. Eventually, while doing so, they were seen by the girl’s parents, upon which the girl turned the tables against the young Anand and blamed him for trying to rape her. He was beaten brutally by the middle-aged parents of the girl who had taken him in as their own son, while the remorseless girl looked on at the still quite confounded young Anand, as he in turn kept on seeing the girl’s unhooked white brassiere in his mind’s eye, her anklet, and her seductive looks towards him. He is eventually thrust out of that home, too, and then comes into the service of the wealthy Satyen Kappu and his devoted wife. Both are middle-aged and childless, and Satyen Kappu, at his wife’s insistence, immediately appoints the young Anand as a member of the household staff, a role he handles well. However, one night while Satyen was on his way to go on a long business trip, his wife came home dead drunk with a young lover in his mid-20s. She shuns the shocked young Anand, who admonishes her that her husband would not expect this from her, and goes upstairs to her bedroom with her lover to sleep with him, while the young Anand is left shell-shocked downstairs to see his mistress’s unfaithfulness to her devoted husband. As chance would have it, that very night Satyen Kappu returns home because of a delay in his flight, and thereby sees his wife in bed with another. He, in wrath, stabs his wife to death after the lover leaves the premises, while the unfaithful wife is still naked in bed. Young Anand witnesses the killing, but instead of admonishing Satyen Kappu, he applauds him with tears for having killed an unfaithful woman, saying that all such women should be dealt with in a similar manner. The joyful and now quite deranged Satyen Kappu adopts young Anand as his own child on the spot, and declares to him what came to pass – that he would educate and care for Anand like his own son and heir, while he, in turn, would remain isolated forever in the servant’s quarters. He would fashion Anand into a woman-hater and ultimately into a lady-killer. All Anand would have to do would be to lure lecherous and unfaithful young women like Satyen Kappu’s wife, Sita (ironic! Even Satyen Kappu in the movie admits the same.), to his bed with his wealth, handsome looks, and charm. However, on the night when he would be having sex with these women, he would pull out a knife from above his bed and stab these naked women several times. All this would be captured on a hidden camera and then shown to the deranged Satyen Kappu and his faithful gardener. The hidden camera would also, in turn, showcase the woman in her private moments, like when she was bathing in the bathroom or changing her garments, to the lecherous eyes of the now insane and quite deluded Satyen Kappu. Then, as mentioned before, the dead body of the woman would be buried in the garden, and would act as ‘fertiliser’ for the red rose bushes growing above. Thus ends the writing on the whitewashed wall, and poor Sharda realises that she is now the prisoner of a madman and his deranged father and staff. Meanwhile, Anand is busy all his days and mostly his nights trying to elude the brother of his murdered stenographer. However, the brother had a waiter friend who had seen Anand on a date with the stenographer at a seedy nightclub and could recognise him. Anand first tries to silence the waiter with money, but eventually, when the waiter starts to blackmail him, he kills him in a fit of intense wrath. When Anand returns home, he realises that Sharda knows the truth about him and that she needs a talking-to. He was in no mood to kill her at all, unlike his other victims, because he had started to fall hopelessly in love with her many virtues. However, Sharda escapes and tries to run for her life from the madman she calls her husband. While chasing frantically after Sharda, Anand gets terribly wounded, which impedes his running. Both fall to the ground eventually, Sharda in complete exhaustion in front of a policeman, and Anand because of loss of blood. Anand is caught by the police, and the truth is revealed through further investigation. However, it is realised that though Anand killed all those earlier women, he showed a tendency to be more than just hesitant to kill Sharda and to allow her private moments or naked body to be seen by his father. This was because he truly loved and respected her and had at last found a woman who was faithful to him in every way. Anand was jailed for a lifetime for all his crimes, but had now gone into a state of maniacal shock as his schizophrenia had taken the better of him. He was no more than a walking corpse. However, he was vaguely aware that he had a wife at last, a woman named Sharda who was faithful to him. Alas, he could not even recognise her anymore, while she, on the other hand, visited him often in jail. Anand’s jailor remembers Anand as a young, dashing, rich, and charming industrialist who, at one point, used to distribute fruit and sweets to prisoners on his birthday. Anand had done so one year ago on October 12. One year hence, Anand himself was incarcerated in the same jail he had once religiously distributed sweets and fruits in, unable to recognize anyone, with a wife still devoted to him in spite of all his terrible deeds and crimes. The movie ends with the hopelessly deranged Anand writing the sentence – ‘Sharda is my wife’ with a piece of charcoal on the wall of his jail cell.

Red Rose Movie Analysis

‘हिरण्मयेन पात्रेण सत्यस्यापिहितं मुखम्।

hiraṇmayena pātreṇa satyasyāpihitaṁ mukham|

The face of Truth is hidden by a golden lid.’

–Isha Upanishad (Shloka 15)

This film serves as a case study for the Sociocultural Approach to Understanding Violence, specifically examining how aggressive behaviour is acquired and maintained. This is especially true for the AS & A Level and the IBDP Psychology curriculum. While Anand’s behaviour is often framed as ‘psychopathic’ (a biological disposition), a psychological analysis using Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) reveals that his violence is a learned response to specific social experiences, mediated by distorted cognitive schemas and reinforced by his environment. The trigger event for Anand or our Kaka was the open brassiere event, and being accused of molestation or rape by the young female wearer of the brassiere. Unlike the classic ‘Bobo Doll’ experiment that we are taught in Bandura’s Theory, where aggression is purely mimicked, Anand’s learning is enactive as it were. He learned a powerful lesson from that incident: basically, innocence is punished, and women are deceptive. This direct experience shaped his ‘outcome expectancies’—he expects betrayal from women, so he strikes first.

Anand does not kill randomly, as you see; he follows a specific ‘script’ of sorts. He targets women who display independence or Westernised traits (smoking, drinking, sexual freedom), fitting them into a ‘bad woman’ schema. In this category would (according to him, obviously, not me!) fall the stenographer and Sheela, the fellow salesgirl working with Sharda. He interprets these ambiguous or benign actions of women as threats or signs of immorality. This would include, among other things shown very well in the film, the stenographer fiddling quite unconsciously with her 1970s-style gold circular pendant on a gold chain near her slight cleavage, or even Sheela hitting on him casually at the garment store or reading erotica novels.

Bandura explains that people can commit violence without guilt by dehumanising victims, something like what Raman Raghav and Ted Bundy did, as I mentioned in the introduction to this movie analysis. Anand justifies his murders as a so-called cleansing of society, viewing his victims not as humans but as symbols of the ‘immorality’ that traumatised him, as well as his very deranged and odious father. These were, of course, not the reasons given by Raman and Bundy for killing their victims, but they were Anand’s reasons nevertheless.

The act of killing provides Anand with a sense of power and control, counteracting the helplessness he felt as a servant boy and even earlier as a very sensitive son of his very violent mother. This internal emotional reward (relief/gratification) reinforces the violent behaviour. At the beginning of the film, when the young kitchen boy wakes Anand up from his sleep by pulling his bedcover away, we see a naked Anand – sweaty and gasping for breath, but relieved as he takes his morning tea from a puzzled young boy and even genially indicates to the boy that the ‘memsahib’ of the night was not there in the bed or in the house, so the second cup of tea was not required. This was a sign of that relief and gratification as mentioned by Bandura.

For much of the film, Anand’s wealth or ‘Environment’ protects him from consequences or ‘his behaviour.’ This lack of punishment acts as a reinforcement, strengthening his belief or ‘Self-Efficacy’ that he is above the law and capable of executing these acts successfully. We had a similar case with Ted Bundy and Raman Raghav, upon whom the movie ‘Red Rose’ was based. Anand’s suave and charming nature was based totally on a mixture of the charm of Ted Bundy and Kaka’s or Rajesh Khanna’s own superstar persona. One especially notices this in the suits Anand wore, which were very similar to those Ted Bundy wore during his courtroom cases, in which the latter actually fought his own case and had the gumption and audacity to think he would get away with all his crimes. The makers of ‘Red Rose’ have admitted time and again that their intention was to give Rajesh Khanna the look he portrayed in the film. This was also the case with Kamal Haasan in the Tamil version of the film.

However, one notices also that Bandura’s theory in IBDP as well as AS & A Level Psychology emphasises learning as the reason for Anand’s crimes, but Anand’s behaviour is obsessive and ritualistic, suggesting a biological or psychodynamic component that SCT might miss. The psychodynamic view, shown with Anand’s obsession with the ‘bra’ and the ‘mother figure’ (Sharda), points to Freudian concepts of repressed sexuality and the Oedipus complex, which SCT doesn’t fully address. That is where the film’s initial rejection of Young Anand’s despotic mother comes into focus. From a biological perspective, the film hints at so-called complete deranged behaviour (psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder), which implies a physiological abnormality (I would say amygdala dysfunction from Young Anand’s reactions to all the episodes of trauma) rather than just learned behaviour.

SCT is heavily weighted toward Nurture (the environment and learning). However, Anand’s behaviour in the film is depicted as increasingly compulsive and ritualistic, remember. That shows signs of Freudianism at play, with a strong push towards Nature. This is simply because SCT by Bandura, though viable as I have suggested, struggles to explain the intensity of Anand’s bloodlust. Let us face facts: why do millions of people experience traumatic breakups or social humiliation (the environment), but only one becomes a serial killer?

A Biological Approach, as mentioned by me earlier, would argue that Anand might have a genetic predisposition or a structural brain abnormality (e.g., a hyper-responsive amygdala or a low-functioning prefrontal cortex) that makes him unable to regulate the aggression he ‘learnt’. So we see that Bandura’s SCT ignores the hard-wiring of Anand’s brain. Therefore, here comes our Ted Bundy angle to the story and the creation of this movie – that man too followed a plot, and his hard-wiring as it were was also quite up to the mark; his bloodlust was insatiable, and he even went to the extent of having sex with decomposing dead bodies of his victims repeatedly over a period of days until there was technically nothing left to copulate with, because the body had decomposed totally. And we know from the psychiatrists working on the Ted Bundy case that the man was suffering from acute Psychopathy, but we also note that Ted was not suffering from any brain abnormality, but Anand shows every sign that he was suffering in that light because he finally goes totally blank in the head at the end of the film, and he cannot bring himself to even recognize the people he was interacting with.

Remember the jailor scenes and dialogues in the movie?

At the beginning of the film, the Jailor makes a crucial remark to Anand when he sees that Anand has forgotten people’s names. The jailor stated, or rather prophesied, that one day Anand would forget the faces of people but would remember their names. This is an indication on the screenwriter’s part of a biological abnormality in Anand’s brain; otherwise, which twenty-something young man would forget the names of familiar people who posed no apparent threat to him so easily?!

So Bandura’s SCT fails to analyse the Nature vs Nurture aspect of Psychology. Then comes its failure to also address the Unconscious or Psychodynamic Conflict in Anand’s mind. Anand’s killings are deeply tied to sexual fetishes (brassieres, naked women, big breasts) and symbolic objects (the red rose, specific clothing like dresses with low cleavages, or Western Clothing). SCT, in this case, focuses only on observable behaviour and conscious cognition; it doesn’t account for the darker, irrational side of the human psyche. A Freudian/Psychodynamic perspective would argue that Anand is suffering from a displaced Oedipus Complex or repressed sexual trauma. His violence isn’t just a learned script; it’s a symbolic attempt to resolve an internal, unconscious conflict that Bandura’s theory simply doesn’t measure.

If you noticed in the film, there is a moment when the mother of Young Anand was driving him out of her life, and he vaguely noticed that she was a big-breasted woman who wore no bra. Probably, if Bollywood Cinema at that time had more liberties, that aspect in the film would have been shown, but obviously, in the 1980s, it was avoided. Thus, beyond the young girl with the open brassiere trigger, we, from a Freudian Perspective in AS & A Level and IBDP Psychology, see now something akin to a classic case of Oedipus Complex with repressed sexual trauma.

Then, Bandura fails to address individual differences in the movie ‘Red Rose’. Anand has a childhood friend and office associate (who was hitting on the stenographer) who knows everything about Anand’s sad past, but grows up to be normal. SCT doesn’t fully explain why two people can have similar social inputs but wildly different behavioural outputs. This is where Temperament or Personality Traits (such as high Neuroticism or low Agreeableness, which we study extensively at the IBDP level) come in—factors that are relatively stable and not necessarily learnt from the environment.

Also, SCT leans toward soft determinism, which simply means that our environment and past experiences ‘programmes’, as it were, our future actions through Reciprocal Determinism. By using SCT in this way, we risk excusing Anand’s violence as an inevitable result of his childhood trauma. It fails to account for personal agency or the conscious choice to seek therapy or change one’s path. If violence is just a so-called learned script, then can a person ever truly be held 100% morally responsible? This is a question that hits you directly in the face that Bandura fails to answer. Even if Anand’s father had become deranged, why did Anand not seek therapy or some help from the police, if not as a helpless teenager, then at least as a young adult or a full-grown adult?

That whole idea seems very ‘cold’ for the lack of a better word. SCT is very ‘cold’ as it treats the human mind like a computer processing mere data, whereas Anand’s killings are ‘hot.’ They are driven by intense rage, pleasure, and emotional catharsis. SCT focuses so much on the mechanism of learning that it often overlooks the raw emotion that fuels the aetiology of violence itself.

I want, at this time, to point out something crucial here, which most modern-day film buffs tend to critique with zero knowledge of psychology, let alone psychiatry. Whenever the topic comes up among film buffs and movie bloggers about the strange reaction or shell-shocked reaction of Young Mayur to all his traumatic childhood episodes, film buffs tend to mock the young Mayur’s behaviour as too ‘theatrical’ or ‘scripted’ or ‘not the regular way a child would react to such trauma’, etc. I would, on that note, like to point out to these film buffs that that is entirely the point we have here, that Young Mayur or Young Anand WON’T REACT LIKE MOST REGULAR KIDS WOULD TO SUCH TRAUMA – that is the point of the film! It is about not the 99 teenagers out of 100 who experience childhood trauma but go on to be bankers, lawyers, teachers, film critics etc., later on in life, but it is about that 1 person in a 100 who will NOT do so and will REACT differently because he is PROCESSING the information differently and so will ACT OUT whatever he INTERPRETS, which usually is not to everyone’s benefit.

Many kids today experience the traumatic situation of finding out that their mother was an unwed mother, technically ‘dumped’ by their biological father, and that now they were adopted by their adoptive parents. However, not all of them grow up to be a ladykiller on that point – but Ted Bundy did. We already know the famous story of Teresa Weiler from the OMG Stories, who was a child of incest and who instead set up a foundation for unwed children of those mothers in London who were born out of incest and whom no one was ready to adopt. Why did she react in this way to her incest birth story and Ted Bundy to his rumoured incest birth story between his mother and grandfather, which again, as I have mentioned, was definitely not true?!

So, I do differ with my film critic colleagues on this matter; I think Young Mayur or Young Anand’s acting was totally justified and realistic. As realistic as a child of his ‘psychological type’ could be in this case. So please do not try to downplay the acting of this young actor (who is now quite grown up and yet who is represented wrongly on Wikipedia – so someone please correct that error! Red Rose’s Mayur Verma was born in the year 1964 and acted throughout the 1980s, 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s in movies like ‘Kuch Khatti Kuch Meethi’, ‘Raju Chacha’, ‘Laawaris’, ‘Muqaddar Ka Sikandar’, ‘7 Saal Baad’ and who even acted as Abhimanyu in B.R. Chopra’s ‘Mahabharat’ the TV Series) who has done great justice to the challenging role given to him at such a young age and in a very challenging period like 1980s India.

But this was only the Psychological aspect of the film Red Rose starring Kaka or Rajesh Khanna. Now we come to an even more crucial AS & A Level perspective on the movie, and that is the Sociological aspect.

For an AS & A Level Sociology analysis (specifically focusing on the chapters Crime and Deviance, Media, and Gender), Red Rose is a goldmine. While Psychology only looks at Anand’s brain and upbringing, Sociology looks at the power structures, social labels, and patriarchal values of the 1980s Indian context. It is therefore more comprehensive than mere Psychology that we have been analysing so far.

I would especially say that the Bollywood movie Red Rose is a textbook study of Misogyny and Patriarchy.

We see this through Mulvey’s Male Gaze Theory. The camera in the film ‘Red Rose’ often views the female victims through Anand’s eyes. Sociologically, this represents the ‘Male Gaze’, where women are reduced to objects to be controlled or punished, as it were. This theory, as most Film Graduates know, was developed by filmmaker and theorist Laura Mulvey, mentioned earlier as a critique of commercial film, but is also applicable to the analysis of art, literature, and other media. Students of Media Studies have to study this theory in great detail, and not only AS & A Level students, or, for that matter, Sociology graduates like me.

Anand’s victims are also often ‘modern’ women. From a Radical Feminist view, Anand acts as an extreme agent of Social Control, punishing women who step outside traditional domestic roles. His violence is a tool to maintain Patriarchal Equilibrium. He can’t tolerate the stenographer who openly admits to having a free sex life, smokes, loves to party, has multiple partners at one time, and wears in his mind ‘revealing clothing’. He can’t even tolerate Aruna Irani or Sheela, who is loud-mouthed, independent, boisterous, commanding, has a lot of agency lacking in her best friend Sharda, and who reads erotica literature or erotica novels. Anand, when waiting for Sharda at the park, thinking that the reader of the erotica novel was her, instead sees Sheela in her place and realises the mix-up, which angers him to the point that Sheela’s fate is sealed and again, Sharda’s estimation in his mind ‘increases’. It further ‘increases’ when Sharda, on one of their many dates, refuses to even kiss Anand on the lips until they are married, but which of course he manages to overcome eventually. Sharda, compared to the earlier ‘wife’ of Anand residing in the palatial mansion, was really affectionate, motherly, and good with children, compared to her predecessor, who would not even return the ball of the neighbourhood children over the mansion gates.

Sharda also, though lent erotica books by Sheela, her best friend, cannot get through them without feeling a great distaste. She is highly God-fearing and does not ask for any expensive gifts from her wealthy suitor and then husband, but a mere clay statue of Ma Durga or the Goddess Durga, which cost him not even a rupee, and surprised even him greatly; and she merely asked for a room for herself to maintain as her ‘puja room’ or for worship purposes. In his eyes, therefore, Sharda maintains the Patriarchal Equilibrium to perfection, while other independent women don’t, and so symbolise the women of his past who traumatized him.

He especially can’t tolerate women who have sexual agency and who are open about their sexual needs. Where the young girl with the open brassiere is concerned, as well, devious or not, she did show sexual agency compared to her male counterpart living under the same roof. The wife of his wealthy employer and later foster father, as well, in another devious way, had sexual agency, and knew that having sex with younger men was her way of being sexually satisfied from the otherwise cooped-up atmosphere of her palatial home, when her husband would spend (as we learn in the movie) months after months away from the home front in the name of business ventures. In a sociological sense, the deaths of Sita, the stenographer, Sheela, etc., function as a symbolic punishment for deviating from traditional submissive roles, which were maintained by Sharda.

Sharda, as played by Poonam Dhillon and then Sri Devi in the Tamil version of the film, is portrayed as the so-called ‘ideal’ woman—pious, chaste, very much a virgin even physically, and traditional. Her survival is narratively linked to her conformity to patriarchal norms, if you’ve noticed. Radical Feminists argue this creates a ‘reward-punishment’ mechanism that pressures women to police their own behaviour in 1980s India. Her virginity was her salvation, as it were. We noticed, crudely but briefly, in the movie how Anand is shown being tormented in front of his peeping-tom father and the gardener, yelling that he could not go through with ‘it’ with Sharda because he ‘loved her-loved her-loved her.’ Here is the typical Madonna-Whore Dichotomy in Sociology, evident in this context. Even most Film Critics critique Red Rose as highly misogynistic and patriarchal in nature, where the plot seems to be trying to ‘police’ the behaviour and agency of women.

So now here we come back to Mulvey, meta-analysis, and the Male Gaze and Objectification in Cinema. We then, therefore, in that context, come into the territory of Liberal Feminism in AS & A Level Sociology, where Liberal feminists focus on how media representations limit women’s social equality by reducing them to objects.

Applying Laura Mulvey’s theory, the camera often adopts Anand’s perspective (the ‘Male Gaze’), turning the female characters into objects of voyeurism and fetishism or visual pleasure. Even as the lead, Sharda’s or Poonam Dhillon’s role is often reduced to a ‘victim in need of rescue’ or a ‘witness’ to the male protagonist’s descent. Her agency is limited; she is a secondary character in a narrative driven entirely by male trauma and male action. Luckily, she is not a stereotypical damsel in distress, which was often the main plot driver or progressor in most Bollywood storylines before the 1980s, and then in the 1990s and early 2000s, but not so now in the third decade of the 2000s.

On the other hand, Radical feminists, like Susan Brownmiller, argue that violence against women is not just ‘madness’ as depicted in the film, but a tool used by men to maintain power over all women. Anand’s serial killing acts as an extreme form of Social Control. By creating an environment of fear for ‘independent’ women or ‘Western’ women, the film reinforces the idea that the so-called ‘safe’ place for a woman is within the domestic sphere under the protection of a traditional man. By framing Anand’s hatred as the result of a single ‘bad woman’ in his past, the film individualises the problem. Feminists argue that this masks the broader sociological reality, that misogyny is built into the foundation of patriarchal society, not just the minds of broken men like Anand.

We then come to the realm of Marxist Feminists. In walks the topic about the stenographer’s investigating brother and the death of the waiter played by actor Shashi Kiran.

Anand’s victims are often employees or women from lower socio-economic backgrounds, like sales clerks or stenographers. His status as a wealthy businessman gives him the institutional power to exploit and silence them. This is what I would term the ‘disposable women’ in such a framework because, in a capitalist patriarchy, the disappearance of working-class women is often treated with less urgency by the state. Anand’s ability to operate undetected in his private mansion highlights how class privilege provides a shield for gendered violence. No one seemed to have the slightest clue for three whole years about what was going on over there! Also, Anand used to do his homework very well on such women and usually preyed only on those who were technically living alone, were alone or almost alone in the world, and, as mentioned earlier, were from the working class.

This is a similar aspect seen in the case of our Raman Raghav 1960s Mumbai murderer who only attacked pavement dwellers and went undetected for quite a while before the police narrowed in on him. The reason for the delay was not simply because it was the 1960s, but also because the victims were the ‘not so powers that be’ in society, or the ‘have nots’ in Marxist terms.

This, however, backfired in the stenographer’s case because she was a teller of tall tales and was actually not alone in life. She had a brother who cared for her well-being and who was in constant contact with her. When he failed to reach her by phone for their regular conversations, he suspected that something terrible had happened to her and began his investigation. During his investigations, he realised that an old neighbourhood friend of his, a waiter at a seedy night-club, had seen his sister with her new boyfriend, and was able to recognise the man. The waiter felt that the gentleman must have something to do with the stenographer’s disappearance, and so even took the trouble to go to Anand’s office with the worried brother to identify the alleged boyfriend. As luck would have it, the waiter checked out the faces of all the men in the office, but not the boss, who was the actual culprit and was seated inside the office in a heightened state of panic, waiting for the waiter to leave. This same waiter is then killed by Anand wrathfully to silence him about the disappearance of the stenographer.

Thus, here we can easily see the intersection of patriarchy and capitalism, where Anand’s money is able to buy him the privacy (the mansion) and the right to exploit those beneath him. He did not predict that the stenographer was a pretentious woman who told tall tales to gain some sense of worth, and so prevented her from telling Anand the truth that she had a doting brother who was in regular contact with her and would therefore easily spot if she had gone missing. The brother, too, during his conversations with Anand, keeps referring to his sister as wayward, promiscuous, too independent, too sexually liberated, a party lover, etc. Basically, he spoke disparagingly of her, almost implying that her disappearance was something to be expected among women of her ilk, yet, being the doting brother that he was, he wished to seek her out.

Here comes the Boogeyman aspect in AS & A Level Sociology concerning the movie Red Rose, in its entirety, including a meta-analytical level—that is, at the cinematic level.

The film serves as a Cautionary Tale. By showing the horrific end of ‘wayward’ women, the media (the film itself) reinforces traditional social norms. It warns the audience of the dangers of the city and modern lifestyle, thereby maintaining social boundaries. This, in itself, acts like a boogeyman, determining the actions of the film’s viewers. The Boogeyman analogy in Sociology represents the invisible yet powerful social forces that dictate our behaviour. Just as a child believes a boogeyman is real and changes their behaviour to avoid it, Emile Durkheim, with his Functionalist Perspective, argued that society’s norms and laws act as objective ‘things’ that exert pressure on us from the outside.

Durkheim insisted that we should treat social facts (like laws, morals, and customs) as objective realities. They exist before we are born and continue after we die, making them independent of any single individual. Therefore, like a boogeyman lurking in the shadows, social facts are external to the individual. You didn’t create the rules of your language or your country’s legal system, yet you must follow them. The ‘fear’ associated with the boogeyman is similar to the social sanctions we face for breaking a norm. If you violate a social fact, society ‘punishes’ you through anything from a legal fine to social gossip, shame, or ostracism.

The movie Red Rose thereby cautions women not to become ‘westernised’ or ‘independent’ or ‘have sexual agency’, otherwise a boogeyman may get them, either literally, like Anand played by Rajesh Khanna, or metaphorically, society at large, by condemning such aforementioned women.

But then, after the Boogeyman comes the Folk Devil.

This is a highly sophisticated angle for an AS & A Level Sociology analysis. To use Stanley Cohen’s book ‘Folk Devils and Moral Panics’ (1972) effectively for the Bollywood movie starring Kaka (Rajesh Khanna) titled Red Rose, we must now shift our focus entirely. Usually, we think of the ‘killer’ as the villain. However, in the context of Media Sociology and Moral Panics, the film Red Rose actually constructs the Westernised Woman as the Folk Devil.

According to Stanley Cohen, a Folk Devil is a person or group portrayed by the media as a threat to societal values. The media uses stereotypical representations to simplify the group, exaggerates the danger they pose, and generates moral panic (public fear) to justify controlling them. Haven’t we heard this old story before!?!?

In Red Rose, the true threat to the social order—according to the film’s subtext—is not just the killer, but the changing behaviour of women. Cohen argues that the media attaches symbols to folk devils so they are instantly recognisable. In the movie Red Rose, the victims are symbolically coded as deviant through visual cues like Western clothing, low cleavage, interest in erotica, smoking, drinking alcohol, openly flirting, etc. The film exaggerates the consequences of this modernity. A woman isn’t just dating here; she is portrayed as inviting death. The narrative suggests that this new Westernised behaviour is dangerous and destabilising to Indian culture.

Cohen then discusses ‘Moral Entrepreneurs’—people who lead the campaign against the folk devil.

Usually, the police or politicians are the moral entrepreneurs. In the movie Red Rose, however, Anand (the killer) acts as a distorted Moral Crusader. He views his killing spree not as ‘murder’ but as ‘cleansing.’ He is punishing the ‘Folk Devils’ (modern women) to restore a sense of traditional purity. The film forces the audience to view the so-called vices of the victims through his eyes, subtly aligning the viewer with the panic. The Red Rose movie itself serves as a medium that amplifies the panic. By showing that traditional Sharda (the virgin) survives while modern women die, the film amplifies the fear of Westernisation. It teaches the audience that “deviance” (modernity) leads to destruction, thereby reinforcing strict social control over women.

Speaking from a cinematic point of view, in 1980s India, the ‘Urban Psychopath’ was emerging as a new Folk Devil. The film plays on the fear of the anonymous, dangerous city stranger—a fear imported from Western ‘slasher’ films, creating a new panic about urban safety. These films were what the 1980s were all about, whether in Bollywood or Hollywood. B-Grade movies, too, would turn towards this ‘Urban Psychopath’ theme, which would be depicted by those neon-like ghastly blue, dull red, light violet, indigo, crimson, dull green, a dash of sickly yellow, etc., colors that would be the highlighted film colours shown in such films. These colours were also shown amply in Red Rose, and I, with the assistance of Google AI, have managed to create that cinematic 1980s colour effect through the various red rose images dotted all over this movie analysis. Another one is shown below.

We can also analyse the film Red Rose through AS & A Level Thinking Skills (Cambridge 9694), which moves away from why he kills (Psychology/Sociology) and focuses on the logic, arguments, and problem-solving within the narrative. I even teach this subject and offer it in my teaching repertoire of 23 AS & A Level and IBDP subjects. And it is a favourite of mine! 😊

In Thinking Skills, we evaluate Arguments (Claims, Reasons, Conclusions) and Problem Solving (Data Analysis and Identifying Flaws).

The narrative of Red Rose provides a fascinating case study in the deconstruction of flawed arguments and the application of formal logic. At the heart of the film is Anand’s internal argument for his violent lifestyle, which can be broken down into a series of reasons leading to a radical conclusion. His primary reasoning is built on a Hasty Generalisation — because he experienced a specific betrayal in his youth, he concludes that all women possess an inherent ‘deceptive nature.’ From a Critical Thinking standpoint, this is a sweeping generalisation where single, emotionally charged anecdotal evidence is used to establish a universal rule. The logic fails because the sample size (two or three women from his past) is insufficient to support a conclusion about an entire gender.

Furthermore, Anand’s worldview is subject to several logical fallacies, most notably the fallacy of confusing correlation with Causation. He observes that his victims often adopt Westernised habits—such as smoking or modern dressing—and falsely concludes that these behaviours cause or are synonymous with moral corruption. This is a Non-Sequitur, as there is no logical link between a person’s choice of attire and their likelihood of betrayal. He also employs a Slippery Slope fallacy, believing that if a woman is allowed any degree of social independence, it will inevitably lead to his own destruction. By failing to account for confounding variables—such as individual personality or his own provocative behavior—his entire deductive framework remains logically unsound despite its internal consistency.

From a Problem-Solving perspective, the film can be viewed as a battle between information management and spatial reasoning. Anand is, initially, a highly effective problem-solver. He identifies ‘relevant data’ as it were, by selecting victims who are socially isolated, thereby minimising the risk of detection. He utilises a sophisticated logical script to maintain his double life, using his mansion as a controlled environment to eliminate ‘variables’ (witnesses). However, his ultimate downfall results from a failure in risk assessment. He suffers from Confirmation Bias, only seeing the ‘traditional’ and ‘submissive’ traits in Sharda that fit his pre-existing schema. Because he ignores the evidence of her intelligence (there is one, and a good one!), he fails to predict her ability to discover and decode his whitewashed wall diary.

Finally, the diary itself serves as crucial evidence that must be evaluated using the RAVEN criteria (Reputation, Ability to Observe, Vested Interest, Expertise, and Neutrality). While Anand has the ‘Ability to Observe’ his own crimes, his Vested Interest in justifying his actions and his extreme Bias render the diary a highly unreliable source of objective truth. It is a record of his cognitive heuristics as we study deeply in Thinking Skills (AS & A Level) —specifically the Availability Heuristic, where his vivid childhood trauma makes him overestimate the ‘danger’ posed by women. In conclusion, Red Rose is a story about a man who is technically proficient at problem-solving but whose life is built on fallacious premises and cognitive distortions.

But now you shall say, WHAT ABOUT THE HORROR SCENES IN THE FILM WHICH UNTIL NOW SEEMS ONLY LIKE A PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER?!

‘For the first time in a very many years, he felt the old vexation, the mingled impatience and pleasure at the world’s beautiful refusal to yield up its mysteries without a fight.’

―Michael Chabon

(American novelist, screenwriter, columnist, and short story writer; Author of the bestseller ‘Telegraph Avenue’)

‘True deduction can only be obtained through a certain amount of self annihilation.’

― Joe Riggs

(Author of the bestselling book ‘The Real Sherlock Holmes: The mysterious methods and curious history of a true mental specialist’)

In AS & A Level Thinking Skills, the relationship between the horror and thriller elements in Red Rose (1980) can be analysed as a strategic integration of genre conventions to manipulate audience expectations and logical deductions. While the film is primarily a psychological thriller, it uses horror “shocks” to serve as empirical evidence for the protagonist’s internal, albeit flawed, logic. The trick is partly achieved by those nauseating 1980s cinematic neon colours I showcased and created for you, my dear reader, in this movie analysis of the Rajesh Khanna-starrer Red Rose. Because another genre of cinema, both B-Grade and first-rate, that incorporated such colours when the 1980s came along was horror. The more B-grade the cinema looked in Bollywood and Hollywood, especially in the 1980s, the more successful the film became!

The horror scenes, however, serve a different logical function in this movie. They act as visceral data points that validate the stakes. In the AS & A Level subject Thinking Skills, we look for Necessary and Sufficient conditions for an effect to occur. While the thriller aspect of the film, which we have already discussed at great length, builds the ‘Necessary’ conditions for fear (isolation, a secret past), the horror scenes provide the ‘Sufficient’ evidence of Anand’s psychopathy. These are, namely, the skeletons, the room of horrors, and the zombie hand from the grave, the black cat licking up Sharda’s blood, the moving hand in the garden, which the gardener snuffs out at the beginning of the film like a rat, and the black cat’s demonic sense of human-like self-possession. These scenes serve as graphic premises that compel the audience to accept the ‘Total Moral Depravity’ of the protagonist, Anand, removing any lingering doubt or counterargument regarding his potential for redemption.

Ultimately, the relationship is one of ‘Premise and Conclusion’ in this particular movie. The thriller elements provide the logical premises of danger, while the horror scenes deliver the inevitable, horrific conclusion of that logic. The horror is used sparingly to recalibrate the audience’s assessment of risk; whenever the thriller pacing might lead a viewer to ‘normalise’ Anand’s behaviour as a simple business-man-with-a-secret, a horror sequence intervenes to provide an irrefutable counter-example, reminding the viewer that the logical outcome of his reasoning is not just crime, but grotesque atrocity.

Here again, on that note, I would like to differ with the current film critics and film buffs online who have severely critiqued these horror portions of the film and spoken disparagingly of them. I would, in turn, beg to differ with them, stating my reasoning, as mentioned above, that this kind of relationship between horror and thriller is not unknown in Artistic, or even Theatre or Cinema, representation. I am not that much of a film buff per se, but I am a voracious reader, and even I am more than aware that this balancing relationship between horror and thriller has existed across all art forms since the Greeks and Mesopotamians, especially the Assyrians. It further developed in intensity (at least for its time) in Dante’s ‘The Divine Comedy’ which gave birth eventually to the fictional novel, which in turn at the same time created the seminal plays of William Shakespeare who was the very archetype of this kind of relationship in his thrillers cum horror plays like ‘Hamlet’, ‘Macbeth’, ‘Julius Caesar’ etc. The novel and the Shakespearean plays emerged at the same time, namely the Renaissance, which eventually gave us the unique plays we enacted on the stage and later in cinema, where, yet again, in almost all of the black-and-white silent cinema, horrors always merged with thrillers.

It is ONLY post World War 2 that we suddenly see a change in cinema, where, after ages gone by, horror elements are separated from thrillers. It was exacerbated in the 1970s and became an established fact by the 1980s. It certainly surprises me to see popular so-called film critics and film buffs unable to see this crucial aspect in their cinema or cinema criticism, which any historian or History graduate or post-graduate can easily deduce blindfolded! Yet another reason to read more books about cinema and other things related to the same, rather than just banally watching movies all day long.

“I find it hard enough to tackle facts, Holmes, without flying away after theories and fancies.’ ‘You are right,’ said Holmes demurely, ‘you do find it very hard to tackle the facts (Lestrade).”

― Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Lastly, I stated that I would tackle only one element in the NEP 2020 IKS Policy topics – namely, the Atman and the Ego. This movie analysis is already more than 11,000 words long, and it is now clear that this will be my last topic on the movie Red Rose. Besides, I’ve been sitting continuously for the past 12 hours straight at this desktop computer typing this analysis from my brain for your perusal, in spite of struggling with the most severe form of chronic osteoporosis and osteoarthritis, compounded by two attacks of Chikungunya, whose main after-effect is yet again, some more rather queer arthritis. It makes you wonder at times why in the world you have bones and a body in the first place, and why not just have an atman or soul and an ego or Ahankara!!!???!!!

But back to the NEP 2020 IKS Policy topics.

 To deepen one’s exploration of the Atman (Pure Soul) being clouded by Ahankara (Ego) in the context of the Bollywood movie Red Rose starring Rajesh Khanna or Kaka, we can look at it through the lens of pure Vedanta philosophy. Now please remember, when we say Vedanta Philosophy, we mean NOT the 4 Vedas but the Upanishads, okay, period. Vedanta is one of the six orthodox schools of Hindu philosophy, focusing on the final part of the Vedas—the Upanishads. Its name literally means ‘the end’ or ‘the culmination’ of the Vedas.

At its core, Vedanta explores the relationship between the individual self (Atman) and the ultimate reality or supreme soul (Brahman). In Hindu philosophy, the Atman is the eternal, untainted witness. In the film, you could interpret the ‘Atman’ as Anand’s lost innocence or the person he could have been. It is the ‘Light’ that is ever-present but completely obscured.

This is a non-dualistic relationship between Atman and Brahman being established here. This interpretation of the Upanishads has been championed by the nationally famous Adi Shankara these days. This school teaches that Atman and Brahman are identical. The physical world is considered Maya (illusion), and liberation comes from realizing that ‘All is One’. This is the Vedanta now being propagated in the India of today by all renowned Hindu Philosophers and Teachers of the Ancient Holy Texts.

Yet there is another school of thought regarding the Upanishads called Vishishtadvaita, which means Qualified Non-dualism. This interpretation was, in turn, associated with Ramanuja; this view holds that Brahman is the supreme reality, but individual souls and the material world are real, distinct ‘parts’ or ‘qualities’ of that supreme whole, much like how cells are parts of a body. It is very much in keeping with the Thomistic Philosophy of Roman Catholics and other Christians, which allows for modernisation, science, adaptation, and advancements in technology and medicine. It, in turn, is thereby in keeping with the teachings of Aristotle, the Greek philosopher who was the tutor of Alexander the Great and the student of Plato.

Ramanuja’s philosophy basically sits between the absolute non-dualism (Advaita) of Adi Shankara and the dualism (Dvaita) of Madhvacharya. Ramanuja’s Vedanta interpretation was considered important in the past, especially till the first decade of the 21^st century in India, when the tide turned and suddenly, with the lack of knowledge of the Hindu populace of the richness of their own philosophy, the Adi Shankara Vedanta interpretation was deemed for some reason the one and only accepted and preached about Vedanta interpretation in the book market today.

Lastly, there is the Dvaita, or Dualism, interpretation, obviously founded by Madhvacharya, as I mentioned before. This school posits that Atman and Brahman are eternally separate. God (Brahman/Vishnu) is independent, whereas souls and the world are dependent. We will not even consider this interpretation for our Red Rose movie interpretation; we will just go with a basic amalgamation of the first two.

Now, let us see a simple picture I created with Google AI’s help of a Red Rose for teaching purposes (now that we are familiar with Vedanta Basics).

Just as my image above shows a beautiful rose (the soul’s potential) stained by blood, the Atman remains pure, but the life lived around it becomes ‘bloody’ due to the ego’s choices. So we see a Ramanuja angle here, so far so good.

Now Ego’s or Ahankara’s turn.

The word Ahankara literally means the ‘I-maker’ (Aham = I, Kara = Maker). Please get those Sanskrit words right, you can’t understand Hindu Philosophy or the Ancient Hindu Texts if you can’t understand Sanskrit, just like you can’t understand Catholic Biblical Theology if you don’t have some basic (if not thorough) knowledge of Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, Italian, and Latin – the last being the Sacred Language of Roman Catholics.

Back to Ahankara.

It is the part of the mind that creates a false identity based on labels, past traumas, and possessions. This is actually what Ahankara encompasses. Ego which I used before was for your comprehension sake, not mine. It was loosely constructed to help you better understand what I am explaining in this part of the analysis. This is also still mainly Ramanuja going on here.

Now, our Anand’s ego (for your sake, not mine) is built entirely on revenge and superiority. He isn’t just a killer; he is a judge. His Ahankara tells him, ‘I have been wronged by women, therefore I have the right to punish them.’ The Katha Upanishad then describes the body as a chariot, with the senses as the horses and the Ahankara often the driver who goes rogue, as it were. In Anand, the ‘driver’ (Ego) has hijacked the chariot, making him blind to the Atman of his victims and his own true self.

So far so good.

Now comes the process of the ego hiding the soul, which in Vedanta Philosophy is called Avarana (concealment).

Now this is more like our Adi Shankara. Anand’s obsession with the ‘Red Rose’ (see my picture above) and his sophisticated exterior constitute his ‘Avarana.’ He uses his wealth, charm, good looks, and social status to veil the monstrous reality of his ego-driven desires. The more Anand kills, the thicker the ‘smoke’ of his actions becomes, making it impossible for the light of his Atman to shine through. He then becomes a prisoner of his own Vasana (latent tendencies/desires). Anand has now completely lost touch with his Atman. He is a soul trapped in a ‘Hell’ of his own making, which aligns with the philosophical idea that heaven and hell are states of mind experienced here on Earth, so back again we are with Ramanuja. Back again, we are with also Medieval Thomism, developed by the Roman Catholic Doctors of Doctors Saint Thomas Aquinas from the writings of Aristotle, which invariably would fit in with Dante Alighieri’s three-part religious text ‘The Divine Comedy’ which as I mentioned earlier in this movie analysis would inspire in a few decades the creation or invention of the novel in literature etc. Even if we have to reject St. Thomas Aquinas and go radically neo-Christian with the Theology of let us say, Karl Rahner of the Vatican II Council Fame or even the Swiss Protestant Karl Barth’s idea of Thomism or the controversial teachings of Hans Urs von Balthasar etc – they all still fall in line more with Ramanuja’s Vedanta interpretation where body and soul both get apparently purified and are like the Virgin Mary assumed body and soul into heaven.

Remember, though, not only the Virgin Mary in Christianity but even many other Biblical figures were also assumed the same way into heaven, for example, Moses, Enoch, and Elijah. Also, Hindu Spiritual Teachers and Ascended Masters in plenty were assumed into heaven, body and soul. The Hindu Spiritual Guides are Yudhishthira, Tukaram, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, and Arjuna.

Now you know why I said I would not have enough time to explain all the aspects of Ancient Indian Philosophy I can glean from the movie Red Rose.

Conclusion

Red Rose starring Rajesh Khanna or Kaka would remind us that unlike most modern-day Bollywood actors who observe every move on their social media day in and day out leaving the ‘thinking’ to their Talent Managers, PR Agents and Publicists – we had a Kaka who used to read his scripts repeatedly, and chose a movie eventually not for its clout but for its essence. While Amitabh Bachchan and his ilk normally chose movies to glorify their own personas, refusing to adapt to any role other than the ‘Angry Young Man’ till they entered their 50s, Kaka was a risk-taker who believed that, more than his character, the director, with his plot, would carry the film forward. But as mentioned before, he used to read, and that is why, despite his failings and the fact that he lost a lot after the 1970s, he is still credited with working in much more substantial movies than his nemesis, Amitabh Bachchan. In fact, one IBDP-1 student who is very fond of me (a girl, relax!) from Podar International School, Santacruz, where I did my PGCITE course last year, told me recently that Amitabh Bachchan seemed to be almost everyone’s nemesis in Bollywood at that time! I felt that was so true, which, in hindsight, tells you a lot about the current octogenarian whose reputation, now under scrutiny from Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha film viewers and students, is no longer as sacrosanct as it was when their grandparents or parents scrutinised his motives back in the day.

In fact, I see many Gen-Z students eager to explore all sorts of films that usually did not make the mark back in the day or, after a few decades, fell by the wayside. They do this, among other things, to seek their own identity in authenticity and uniqueness, and I think they do find that kind of mix in the films of Kaka or Rajesh Khanna, including ones as controversial as Red Rose. This is because, besides his many faults, Rajesh Khanna was a thinking actor behind a handsome or ‘pretty face’. It was during his college years spent in Mumbai that he became deeply involved in theatre and won several inter-college drama competitions. During his time at K.C. College, he even tutored his friend Jeetendra for his first film audition, who also became a famous Bollywood movie star. His charismatic persona was so significant that the Mumbai University later included an essay in its syllabus titled ‘The Charisma of Rajesh Khanna’ in one of its textbooks. Note that during that time, Rajesh Khanna’s breakthrough in theatre came with the play ‘Andha Yug’, in which he played a wounded mute soldier. His silent performance was so powerful that the chief guest encouraged him to pursue a career in films. He is exceptionally brilliant in such evocative performances where no dialogues are involved. This adeptness for the same in ‘Andha Yug’ is shown brilliantly in the last scene of the film Red Rose, which could make even the greatest hater of Ted Bundy also weep in compassion for a man who has lost his mind, only to remember the name of ‘Sharda’ and not her ‘identity’.

During his schooling at St. Sebastian’s Goan High School in Mumbai, Kaka was known to be a dedicated student. Since he lacked a quiet place to study at home, he and a group of 6–8 students would use their school classrooms for self-study daily from 5:30 pm to 8:30 pm. Even as a student, he showed leadership and teaching qualities. He was known to help his juniors with their academic difficulties during these self-study sessions and later tutored his friend Ravi Kapoor (Jeetendra) for his first film audition, as I mentioned earlier. While specific lists of his favourite books are rare in public records, his intellectual life was heavily centred around literature and music. His ‘reading’ was primarily professional and artistic. He was known for a deep understanding of characterisation and would often request detailed character sketches before performing. He had a sophisticated understanding of music and would personally sit in sessions with music directors like R.D. Burman to decide on final tunes, indicating he was well-versed in the language of musical composition and rhythm.

Truly, if given more of a chance and better guidance post those early back-to-back 15 blockbuster hits, we would probably have had more films showcasing the acting talents of an actor known as India’s First Superstar. But it is heartening enough to see Gen-Z in droves rediscovering Kaka’s movies once again.

I hope to view and analyse more of Kaka’s movies in the coming days and weeks for IGCSE and IB Board students. I hope to watch and analyse more movies in the near future on my website teaching portfolio for PGCITE fizapathansteachingportfolioforpgcite.com where you can find book reviews, movie reviews, education oriented interviews, educational professional conferences, educational content in braille, IB/IGCSE teaching content, IB/IGCSE Teacher Training Content, Action Research Project Initiatives, Online Games, etc., and all for free always. 😊

Special Note

If you are interested in some book reviews, indie author interviews, book analyses, short story analyses, poems, essays, essay analyses, and other bookish content, check out my blog, insaneowl.com. If you are interested in purchasing my books, you can check the products page of my blog or on Amazon. There is a lot of good stuff to buy! Happy reading to you always!

©2026 Fiza Pathan

©2026 Fiza Pathan