The film explores questions of identity, justice, beauty, meaning and death through an experimental photographer, an ailing monk and a young stockbroker.
If the parts of a ship are replaced, bit-by-bit, is it still the same ship? A celebrated experimental photographer struggles with the loss of her intuitive genius as an unexpected aftermath of a physical change; an intellectual monk confronting a complex ethical dilemma with a long held ideology, has to choose between principle and death; and a young stockbroker, following the trail of a stolen kidney, learns how intricate morality could be. These disparate characters manifest philosophical dilemmas in their personal lives, but their narratives converge to reveal an even larger fabric of connections, meaning, beauty, existence and death in a delicately poetic finale.—Recyclewala
Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus's Paradox, is a paradox and a common thought experiment about whether an object is the same object after having all of its original components replaced over time, typically one after the other.
In Greek mythology, Theseus, the mythical king of the city of Athens, rescued the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the Minotaur and then escaped onto a ship going to Delos. Each year, the Athenians would commemorate this by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honor Apollo. A question was raised by ancient philosophers: After several hundreds of years of maintenance, if each individual piece of the Ship of Theseus were replaced, one after the other, was it still the same ship?
Over a millennium later, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes extended the thought experiment by supposing that a ship custodian gathered up all of the decayed parts of the ship as they were disposed of and replaced by the Athenians and used those decayed planks to build a second ship. Hobbes then posed the question of which of the two resulting ships-the custodian's or the Athenians'-was the same ship as the "original" ship.
Hobbes considers the two resulting ships as illustrating two definitions of "Identity" or sameness that are being compared to the original ship:1. the ship that maintains the same "Form" as the original, that which persists through complete replacement of material and;2. the ship made of the same "Matter", that which stops being 100 per cent the same ship when the first part is replaced.
Aaliya Kamal (Aida El-Kashef) is a visually impaired (she lost her eyesight to cornea infection) and celebrated Egyptian photographer in the process of undergoing a cornea transplant that will restore her vision. Aaliya is supported by her husband, who encourages her at every point. But Aaliya has frequent doubts over the quality of her own work and is not very open to even the tiniest criticism. Aaliya gets very sensitive when anyone points out that one of her pictures is good, when she feels that she was not in complete control while taking the picture.Aaliya relies on sounds to take her pictures and uses text to speech software to edit her work and create the final product.
Though the surgery is a success and Aaliya's vision is restored, she has trouble adjusting to her newfound sense of sight and is dissatisfied with her resulting photography. When she was blind, Aaliya would simply click pics which resulted in them being spontaneous and witty. But after gaining eyesight, the pics were posed and didn't seem natural at all.
Aaliya tries hard to re-discover her Mojo. She covers her eyes to do her instinct photography. She goes to the mountains. Nothing works & Aaliya only can sit and ponder at her dilemma presented to her by fate.
Maitreya (Neeraj Kabi), an erudite Jain monk, is part of a petition to ban animal testing in India. To petition the courts he walks for hours in the morning to reach the high court of Mumbai. When he is diagnosed with liver cirrhosis, his reluctance towards animal tested medication is questioned and he must now depend on the people he's been fighting against - a path he refuses to take. The doctor has told him that a liver transplant is the only viable option at this stage of the disease. Maitreya will also need to take medications to sustain himself till he gets the transplant. The medicines are the same manufacturers whom Maitreya is petitioning against. He refuses to take the medicines.
Maitreya makes peace with himself, stops eating any cooked food (will only eat natural foods only) and starts speaking less and less. He has started withdrawing from the world. Maitreya gets worse with time. He develops a skin condition with deep sores in his body. He loses urine and bowel control. Maitreya is dying a slow and painful death. Eventually he compromises his beliefs & asks his doctor to take him under his care.
A young Indian stockbroker, Navin (Sohum Shah), has just received a new kidney. He soon learns of a case of organ theft involving an impoverished bricklayer, Shankar. Shankar was admitted into the same hospital as Navin, just a few days earlier. Later it was found that Shankar had a kidney removed during a routine operation. His initial fears are that his new kidney was the one stolen from Shankar.
When Navin learns that the recipient of the stolen kidney lives in Sweden, he decides to go there to help Shankar get his kidney back - but ponders if Shankar is perhaps better helped by a large financial settlement instead of having two kidneys again.Navin is told by the recipient that he can't return the kidney but will look for another donor to get Shankar his kidney back. But behind Navin's back, the recipient offers Rs 6.5 Lakhs to Shankar and Shankar is eternally grateful to Navin as the going rate for kidney's is only Rs 30,000.
Navin attends a meeting of all people who benefited from the organs of his donor. There were 8 people in all. Navin had received the left kidney. Apparently, Maitreya had received the liver and was attending the meeting too. Aaliya had received the corneas.
Ship of Theseus ends with the Platonic Allegory of the cave. The philosopher Plato argues that human beings are imprisoned in the cave of their own existence, falsely believing the temporary as having permanence. The job of a philosopher, he argues, is to help people find a way out of the cave.
In the last scene of the film, we see the shadow of the man in the walls of the cave he is exploring. The man who we see only as the shadow in this clip did not make it out of the allegorical prison-cave described by Plato.
