I believe it was in some interview, where Director Govind Nihalani was discussing his film Ardh Satya (1983). The film was revered by masses and critics alike as India’s first corrupt cop movie.
That would mean an entire nation watched the film, grasped the story, and interpreted it accordingly. Then in the interview, decades later, Nihalani mentioned he had written it as a father-son story.
That was amusing at first, but also raised a question: what are stories without their interpretations?
Like an art piece in a museum, one never knows what went on inside the mind of the artist, but everyone interprets it their way, and that becomes their takeaway. It may excite them or repulse them, but most likely it’s because of their interpretation.
This applies beyond art and cinema. A floodlight is a floodlight, but when it’s processed by the lighting crew onto the characters sitting in front of the camera, it becomes bright sun or moon. The floodlight doesn’t change; the interpretation changes the narrative.
That thought led me into my own rabbit hole.
What if stories had more to offer than what we initially noticed?
What if we could relook at a story and perhaps shift the interpretive lens just enough to give it an entirely new meaning?
The first movie that came to mind was E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). From there, the leap toward PK (2014) was not far.
So here’s looking at both movies through a “shifted lens.”
Take the Bollywood movie PK and the Hollywood movie E.T. Instead of seeing the protagonists as aliens, what if we see them as newborn children?
How does that shift the perspective and our understanding of the movies?
Immediately, a crucial pattern emerges in both films: the violence of adult interpretation itself. Adults consistently force meaning onto these characters’ innocent actions, projecting complex frameworks where none exist. When PK touches feet or asks simple questions, adults assign religious significance.
When E.T. glows or extends his finger, humans impose scientific or mystical interpretations. This mirrors the immediate conditioning process that begins at birth: how society starts interpreting natural infant behaviors through adult meaning-systems, already beginning the overlay and distortion that will eventually sever the child from their original nature.
Let’s begin with PK.
The story begins when PK is dropped naked into the desert. It is the primal moment of birth: the infant is pushed out of the womb, stripped of comfort, warmth, and silence, then thrown into a dry, hostile world. His panic is immediate. He clutches at his “remote”—the umbilical cord, the tether to origin. But it is snatched away.
In that instant, PK is condemned to wander like every human being: disconnected from the source, searching for what was lost.
PK’s first struggle is with language. He misinterprets idioms, takes metaphors literally, stumbles through Bhojpuri before finding Hindi. It is exactly what every newborn endures. Words are not natural—they are cages. A child’s mind, once free, is forced into patterns of speech that define what can and cannot be thought. In learning language, PK inherits humanity’s prisons: the frames that dictate reality.
As the story progresses, or as the child grows, PK steals or swaps clothes, constantly shifting appearances. Here, clothing is not fashion—it is the performance of identity. Society dresses children in labels: gender, caste, religion, nationality.
PK puts them on as costumes because that’s all they are—temporary disguises imposed on an innocent being who, at essence, has no costume at all.
His behavior reveals pure imitation—copying gestures, social cues, and appearances without grasping their deeper meaning. This is exactly how infants learn—pure mimicry before comprehension, absorbing surface behaviors while innocent of their cultural weight.
PK reacts with intense vulnerability to stimuli that adults have learned to filter out—the chaos of religious festivals, the noise of conflicting belief systems, the overwhelming complexity of social hierarchies. This hypersensitivity is that of the newborn experiencing reality without protective filters.
Crucially, the adults around PK consistently misunderstand what he actually needs, projecting their own frameworks onto his innocent behaviors. When he touches someone’s feet or asks simple questions, they immediately assign complex religious or cultural significance.
PK’s confusion with multiple gods mirrors the universal confusion of every child confronted with contradictory scripts of belonging.
The remote, PK’s holy grail, is the umbilical cord, the lost connection to origin. PK’s entire journey is about reclaiming it. Without it, he is condemned to wander in confusion. With it, he can return home. The message is stark: life is not about learning to live better here; it is about finding a way back.
In the end, PK chooses to leave. This is not escapism. It is recognition.
The world is suffering because suffering is the nature of existence itself. To be born is to be exiled. To live is to endure conditioning and illusion. To die—or return—is to finally dissolve back into origin, into nothingness, into the womb of the universe.
The same lens reveals similar patterns in E.T.
The story begins with E.T. landing and instantly getting “lost,” separated from his kind. This is the moment of birth: separation from the womb, cut off from the umbilical “mothership.” His awkward body, glowing heart, extending neck, odd noises—all map to a child’s raw potential before being normalized. Babies are “alien” in that same way: disproportionate, fragile, strange, yet overflowing with pure potential.
E.T.’s heart glows with every emotional state, reacting intensely to stimuli that humans have learned to moderate. His hibernation-like states and unusual rest cycles mirror infant sleep patterns—different from adult rhythms, almost otherworldly in their depth and necessity.
E.T.’s powers are metaphors for the infinite plasticity and possibility of a child before the world begins to impose limitations. Childhood potential feels magical precisely because it hasn’t yet been destroyed by conditioning.
Elliott doesn’t just “befriend an alien”; he mirrors himself in the newborn. This is the primal childlike state of undivided subjectivity: the newborn and caregiver are still “one.”
E.T.’s echo-speech (“Elliott… Elliott…”) reveals pure echolalia—the way babies first learn language through repetition without full comprehension, absorbing sounds before meaning.
The hazmat suits and sterile labs don’t just represent human paranoia. They are the social order intruding on innocence, dissecting and classifying the raw being until the magic leaks out. “Growing up” means losing the unconditioned potential—being probed, measured, and caged by institutions.
E.T.’s “death” in the medical lab can be read as the moment of complete societal conditioning: innocence strangled, wonder clinically declared extinct. His revival is the flicker of possibility that even under social weight, some essence of that newborn infinity can still glow.
E.T. leaving in the end is a return to the unmanifest—to the pre-birth, pre-conditioned universe, before life’s suffering.
Both characters are essentially premature births—consciousness torn from sustaining environment before readiness. The remote and mothership aren’t destinations; they’re phantom limbs. The ache for something once part of you but now impossibly distant. Neither character is learning about our world—they’re learning to survive without the connection that once defined their existence.
Every interaction is a search for substitute sustenance and meaning. Both PK and E.T. experience the same fundamental trauma: the severing of the umbilical connection to source. Their entire journeys become attempts to recreate or return to that primal unity.
Notice what happened. Neither PK nor E.T. changed. The scripts remained identical, every frame exactly the same. What shifted was one simple assumption: alien = newborn.
That tiny interpretive pivot could transform a religious satire into an existential lament, a children’s adventure into a parable about innocence lost.
Stories are like that. They always carry deeper meanings, depending upon the angle of vision we use to see them.
After all, in cinema as in life, discoveries often come not from looking harder, but from shifting perspective.