Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar, follows Janardhan, a simpleton from Delhi, chasing his dreams of becoming a Jim Morrison style Rock star. He is shattered, when he is advised to look up other professions as he doesn’t have it in him, the quality that makes great artists – ‘pain’. 

Janardhan does become Jordan, the Rock Star that he set out to become. But what does pain have to do with art and artists? Well, it has to do with the relationship between the ‘Human Condition’ and ‘Attention’. Afterall, attention is the beginning of devotion. As Julia Cameron, writes in ‘The Artist’s Way’, “In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, we learn to pay attention to right now. And the reward for attention is always healing. It may begin as the healing of a particular pain, but what is healed, finally, is the pain that underlies all pain: the pain that we are all ‘unutterably alone’.” Capturing this eternal loneliness and the ensuing vulnerability is what makes Rockstar a classic. 

Thus, beyond the story of a singer trying to find his way up to the charts, Rockstar becomes the story of a lost traveler – a pilgrim – trying to find his eternal ‘home’.  A ‘home’ beyond the grave – something precious, something noble, that can’t be meant for the worms.​