To Imtiaz Ali, With Love: Thank You For Presenting 'Pain' As Beautiful And Teaching Us To Start Again...

Imtiaz Ali’s films don’t just talk about love- they dive deep into the ache, the incompleteness, and the quiet transformation that follows a broken heart. This isn’t about happily-ever-afters. It’s about finding yourself in the ruins. If you've ever loved deeply and lost, this is the kind of story that might just find you. Scroll down to read explore how Imtiaz makes heartbreak feel almost... sacred.

(All photos credit: IMDb)

Have you ever felt like you didn’t get the happy ending in your story? Like something ended too soon, or maybe something never really began but it still changed your forever. That is the kind of love Imtiaz Ali talks about. His characters don’t just deal with heartbreak, they live it. His films not just explore love as something that needs to be achieved, they show it as a journey, often incomplete, often painful, but always transformative. The characters don’t long for happily ever after, they chase the meaning hidden in the moments in between. The ‘concept of incompleteness’ in his films is what stays with us because that's how real life is, raw, imperfect and unfinished.

We all have seen his films, Rockstar, Tamasha, Highway, and even Laila Majnu which he didn’t direct but produced and deeply influenced. All the stories have somewhere glorified breakups, but they don’t stop at glorification, they have talked beyond it. He simply teaches in all his love stories that life doesn’t end when love ends, it often begins there.

Love, I believe, is the strongest emotion, and no matter how hard we try to deny it, we all long for it somewhere deep in our hearts. As Sophocles once said, “One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: that word is love.” Imtiaz doesn’t show just one side of heartbreak, he shows that heartbreak is not just about crying, howling and moving on, it can make you achieve everything like Rockstar, it will break everything like Laila Majnu or it will make you discover yourself like Tamasha.

Imtiaz shows that love doesn’t always end in union, sometimes it ends in fire, and that fire creates something the world remembers forever. Just like Janardhan’s transformation into “Jordan” in Rockstar, he didn’t become what he was because he wanted to. Love and heartbreak made him do it, it cut so deep that he started bleeding music. His pain didn’t destroy him, it became a part of him. In his story, heartbreak turned into art and into something the world could feel.

In Laila Majnu, Qais literally went mad, not really in a clinical way but in spiritual ways, what he did was not love, it was devotion and his heartbreak? It was his path for his spiritual awakening. Heartbreak may leave you shattered at first but it can also make you dissolve into something way bigger than yourself. Because remember, Qais didn’t need Laila’s physical presence, he was so consumed by love that he began hallucinating her, and to him, that was enough. He didn’t become 'Majnu' by loving her, but by being destroyed by that love.

And in Tamasha, Tara’s rejection made Ved discover himself and it reveals the version of Ved that love was pointing toward all along. Tara didn’t reject him out of cruelty or because she stopped loving him, but out of deep hope that he might find himself, and her walking away from the Ved didn’t break our hearts, in fact, it became the most beautiful part of the film. Imtiaz uses emotional suffering as a doorway to introspection. His characters are not victims of heartbreak, they are shaped by it.

Imtiaz also provokes the one thing we all crave for after breakups, ‘Closure’ but he shows that closure is not what we need, we need understanding. Because Jordan never got a closure, neither did Qais, and that is completely fine. Life is not about closures, it’s about embracing the pain and carrying it forward effortlessly. And similarly love is not the final destination, it’s the pathway for self-love.

Imtiaz Ali doesn’t use heartbreak as a plot twist. For him, heartbreak is sacred. Yes, it's painful but it’s also a place of becoming, of truth, of deep emotion. And maybe that’s why we relate to him so much because he sees us in the most broken, raw and real moments. And the best part is he doesn’t show heartbreak at the end, he shows the beginning of the self. Because as human beings, no matter how shattered we are, we still carry hope somewhere in our hearts and his stories remind us that there is life, growth, and even beauty (beyond everything) after heartbreak. 

As Oscar Wilde said, "The heart was made to be broken." And maybe, in that breaking, we finally meet ourselves.

(The opinions shared here are those of the author and do not reflect the views of Zee News.)