They say Aandhi is based on the life of India's first woman Prime Minister, India's Iron Lady - Indira Gandhi. Maybe it is true, maybe it is not. If it is, then Indira Gandhi should have been happy about the way she has been presented.<br /><br />Indira Priyadarshani Gandhi was daughter of India's first Prime Minister, Nehru. She fell in love with Feroze Gandhi (a young politician born as Feroze Sopariwala) and they had two children (the younger of which went on the become the third Prime minister from the family). Their married life was not very successful, was it because of Indira's father's political ambitions (that Feroze a respected and righteous politicians interfered with) or because of some personal reasons is hard to guess, though several speculations do exist (especially from pro RSS historians who use any means to tarnish the name of the politically influential Gandhi family), and Feroze & Indira started living separately. Before he died Feroze had a heart attack, and Indira and he were re-united till his death a short time later. <br /><br />There are parallels with Indira Gandhi's life in Aandhi. But mostly the story is very different. It is hard to imagine how Gulzar came out with a movie like Aandhi when Indira Gandhi had imposed an emergency in India during that time. If my memory serves me right I even heard it was banned for sometime.<br /><br />The female protagonist Aarti Devi (Suchitrra Sen) is daughter of a politician and she falls in love with a Hotel Manager (Sanjeev Kumar). She does have a strong personality. There marriage is broken but that is about it (with respect to similarities).<br /><br />I love the movie because of the strong performances by Sanjeev Kumar and Suchitra Sen and the direction of Gulzar. Gulzar's recent movies have been very politically opinionated but Aandhi even though it is set in a political setting is not much about about politics itself. Primarily it is about re-discovery of love in a broken marriage. <br /><br />We travel back and forth in time to find about the past and present of the couple, we even find that they still have feeling for each other but it is the dirty political games and the interventionist attitude of the public and the press that forces them to face and brings out the truth about there lives.