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Chopra's protagonist found his alter ego in the umpteen angry young men living in the shadows of the high-rise concrete jungle. Hence the unstinted applause for him and his ilk.
The character of Vijay encountered a second coming in Chopra's next film, Trishul. Coming close on the heels of Deewar, Trishul re-created the angry splendour of the earlier protagonist. Only this time, the fury was more personalised and focused. It was directed towards a single person - the man who walked out on his beloved, leaving him to bear and breed his illegitimate child. All for the sake of a prosperous business career. Vijay never forgave his father (Sanjeev Kumar) for his desertion and neglect and returned twenty years later, with just one seething desire: revenge. The man must pay for his misdemeanours and account for his abandoned wife's anguish, believed the vengeance-prone son.
Only, this time, in keeping with Chopra's penchant for the unusual and the innovative, vengeance takes the form of a corporate war and a battle of nerves between the father and the son. Setting up a rival construction company, Vijay gradually eats away both into his father's business empire and his familial harmony. One by one, they all desert him - the son (Shashi Kapoor), the daughter (Poonam Dhillon), the trusted secretary (Raakhee). So much so, that having lost all his assets - family and property - the father is reduced to a state of nothingness. But only after a gritty battle of nerves and a duel of upmanship has unfolded through several dramatic twists and turns in the narrative.
From birth to adulthood, Vijay is saddled with a legacy of hate which might have transformed life into a living hell for a lesser mortal. But not for Chopra's hero. For him, this seething cauldron works like a secret spring of strength, vigour and vitality. Gorging on this elixir of antagonism, he passes from one vitriolic encounter to another. The only objective being to hurt the man responsible for his mother's anguished plight. So intense is his aversion that at one place he even tilts the traditional syndrome of illegitimacy until it stands on its head. Instead of looking upon himself as the 'bastard child of a successful businessman', he prefers to transfer the scourge of illegitimacy on his father. "You are my illegitimate father," he mutters, warding off the repentant man's overtures of long overdue affection. A relentless fountain of hate, the tide is stemmed only in the end. But by the time the son softens his stand and the father-son relationship gains precedence over the exploiter-victim bond, the aging patriarch is a broken man.
If Deewar was a poignant assertion of the basic humanity and individuality of the urban dregs then Trishul carried in its folds a low-pitched lament against the unscrupulous cult of Mammon. Vijay was the angry voice of conscience which rose from the ashes to remind the successful businessman of his past omissions, his unfulfilled obligations and neglected duties. At the root of the conflict between the father and the son was a set of misguided priorities: onwhere the matters of the heart were sidelined by the accumulative drive; where emotional commitment became secondary to materialistic munificence and where money easily overshadowed morals.
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