Joseph (Malayalam, 2018)
Director: M Padmakumar
This movie gives another twist to how man's greed hijacks a noble intention like organ donation. Good virtue has been held in high esteem and is said to be the raison d'être of man’s existence. The sound of one man’s death knell signalling another's beginning of life sounds cruel, but that is how life is. Death and tragedy in the goat family are signs of survival and satiety in the tiger family.
As creative as a man can be, he knows about demand and supply, market forces and the electrifying power of the currency. Money, a lubricant in most transactions, eases this. The desperate seeker calls these middlemen God-sent. The mourners find solace in knowing they had done one good deed before the last call. The observers call it unscrupulous when they see the donors donating before their time is up and the deserving recipients are bypassed for the highest bidder.
Man has converted everything into businesses, invented creative schemes to monetise even cadaveric organs, and, if needed, expedited death when the situation demands. They become the ‘invisible hands’ that guide the economy.
Socrates may have convinced Greeks and generations after him to promote good virtue and philosophy as the basis of human living. Plato preached that a wise person uses his mind to understand moral reality to apply it to daily life. No more; this train of thought is so passé. It is not applicable in kali yuga. We all bow to the Money God. Virtue is so Satya and Treta yuga.
They say our data is protected, and our personal pledges are classified. Any firewall is only as good till the next version hits the market. These systems' inventors will leave a loophole for them to market their next upgrade.
Hence, our private data, including medical information, are all out for scrutiny. Hackers, in collaboration with sneaky businessmen who regularly taint noble professions, will stop at nothing to scheme out plans after plans to profit themselves.
In this movie (spoiler alert), pledged donors are screened during their routine medical examination and matched to potential foreign recipients. A fake accident is arranged by thugs in a remote locale. A Good Samaritan, also part of the gang, would bring the accident victim to a predestined hospital. The victim would invariably perish without regaining consciousness. Organs will be harvested. Local recipients planning to receive these transplants would undergo dummy operations, but the organs would be shipped far away.
A retired police officer had to lose two family members, his late teen daughter and his wife, to these fraudsters before smelling a rat. He devised an elaborate to uncover the whole network.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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