Can you handle the digital truth?

Love Today (Tamil; 2022)
Writer, Director, Actor: Pradeep Ranganathan

It is said that the amount of data carried by a mobile phone is equivalent to the amount needed to launch the spaceship Apollo 11. Having that much data, like an appendage attached to our body, cannot be without liabilities. People store way too much muck in there that, at any time, anyone can use it to paint an individual how they want him to be painted. With the same brush, they can be either portrayed as a saint or a devil re-incarnated from the raw data.

People, like salivating dogs to a bone, will volunteer their personal information to be used and misused at the sight of dangling freebies. All the promise of privacy is a fallacy. With a few tweaks here and there, the digital trail is at your disposal.

This innovative movie highlights this exact problem. Two lovebirds fall helplessly in love with each other. When the boy approaches her father for her hand, the father, a strict disciplinarian, puts the couple to the test. He thinks the couple should know each other before plunging head-on into tying the matrimonial knot.

The couple was told to swap phones for 24 hours before committing to each other. That is when the fun starts. Even though each initially resists the temptations to pry into the other's private lives, curiosity sets in. Compounded with suggestions by people around them and wanting to delete particular unsavoury messages that may be construed as offensive or suspicious, the boy scrambles to delete them cryptically. Paradoxically, it just increases each other's suspicion. The couple ends up hating each other.

On the other hand, the lover boy's sister is getting married soon. She is curious why her soon-to-be-groom is so secretive about anyone else accessing his mobile phone. She wonders if he is hiding something. That starts another tussle to lay a hand on the coveted husband-to-be.

The final take-home message is that sometimes it is worthwhile not knowing everything. Some things are left unknown. Some stones are better left unturned. 

Do we want to know the truth, the whole truth and everything about the truth, really?

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.