RIFLE RANGE BOY: Medical science and medical crime!

Kuttram 23 (Tamil; குற்றம் 23, Crime 23; 2019)

It looks like the trend these days in the Tamil movie industry is to make films with a social message using contemporary issues. You have to appreciate the story overlooking the fact that the filmmakers still use the same old time tested masala flavours. You have to stop asking why the hero is the only policeman who seems to be doing actual work. The others are just there to fill up the numbers and crack jokes to entertain fellow policemen and the viewers. You have to ignore how a single lone wolf unharmed policeman can always bring down bands of hardcore criminals, physically with brute force every time. The hero will do this even if he is injected with botulinum toxin. But wait! When the villain is imbued with the same, he succumbs to the effects almost immediately.

Pushing aside all the technical issues, not wondering how clomiphene citrate (a fertility drug) can be traced in the fluids of a cadaver of a mother, what more in an advanced stage of pregnancy, or how paternity test can be on done dead tissues, it, nevertheless, breathes new ideas into storytelling.

Is it not ironic that society gives so much importance to the continuity of progeny, of passing down the genetic imprints that they are willing to go through great lengths to achieve parenthood? This they do, despite knowing that many orphans are present among us yearning for homes to grow in. On the one hand, there is a significant push to use and misuse medical breakthroughs to achieve fertility, to shed the social stigma of being barren, whilst on the other hand, offsprings are discarded heartlessly as an unwanted by-product of attaining man and woman's carnal pleasure.

Is the passing of genetic pool and achieving fantastic outcomes so important that unscrupulous people would go to any length to attain their goals? The next question is the use of donor gametes to achieve conception.

Scientists do unimaginable feats just because it is difficult to do, to push the boundaries of human capacity. Can advanced fertility treatments be considered a kind of overindulgence? Just food for thought.

(P.S. 23 in the title refers to the 23 pairs of chromosomes that form the axis of life. Man in their greed to attain fame and power, would monetise, criminalise and abuse any new knowledge that comes to him.)