Some are like that...

Bad Girl (Tamil, 2025)

Written & Directed: Varsha Bharath 

https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/movies/vetri-maaran-anurag
-kashyap-bad-girl-teaser-mohan-g-brahmin-protagonist/article69149508.ece

The feminists often complain that they are living in a toxic world filled with archaic rules dictated by a patriarchal society. They frequently quote excerpts from ancient Indian scriptures, such as the Manu Smriti, to support their argument. Spiritual masters, on the other hand, defend the ancient text, saying it has been taken out of context. 

Nevertheless, the effort to rectify the ancestors' wrongs never ceased. The aggressive struggle by these warriors may have just shifted the balance. Instead of finding the right place within the gender dynamics, they may have gone too far. They forget that both genders are biologically designed differently to perform different roles. 

This realisation must have dawned on the protagonist by the end of the film. Ramya begins as a teenager in a strict Brahmin family, deeply immersed in traditional beliefs, such as not entering the kitchen during menstruation and adhering to the family's hierarchical order. She feels suffocated because her school is similarly rigid. The private school maintains strict discipline, and to make matters worse, her mother also teaches there. 

Unable to cope with her challenges at school, such as being caught in close proximity with a boy and failing miserably in her exams, Ramya's parents decide to send her to a boarding school. Things go awry without parental supervision. She goes rogue, befriending seniors, smoking, drinking, and engaging in casual sex. 

A quick look at her behaviour might suggest that Ramya is showing all the obvious signs of a typical Gen-Z, or it could be something more alarming, like bipolar disorder. She believes she is the centre of the universe, is hedonistic, and has tangled priorities. The recurring theme is a desire for validation and immediate gratification. Ramya also connects better with animals than with humans. A pet means more to her than her own parents. Of course, these are merely distractions from the main issue. 

The years dragged by. After many failed relationships, fleeting jobs, changing circles of friends, and a strained relationship with her family, Ramya is in her mid-thirties. She realises her peers have settled into life and have a clear path to follow, while she is still moving forward, with no permanent place to stay and no one to return to each night. 

She believes there could be value in following the path most commonly taken by those who came before us. 

P.S. Upon the release of its trailer, the producer and director received plenty of brickbats for depicting underage drinking, portraying the Brahmins negatively, and for vulgarity. Protests were taken to court, and vulgarities were bleeped. Still, this reflects reality. In every community and society, some outliers follow the least conventional path. It suits them just fine. The moral guardians prefer to whitewash society, suggesting that everyone follows a single, paved path. 

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Nothing like being free!

Kummathy (Bogeyman, Malayalam; 1979)

Director: G Aravindan

Most viewers would not have heard of this movie maker, mainly known as a legend in the Indian alternative cinema field. Unlike the masala Bollywood kind of logic-defying escapism that excites the masses, these artsy films only fascinate people who see beyond the story and what is shown on the screen. Some label this film as the best Indian movie ever made.

The movie came to the mainstream's attention after Martin Scorsese's team restored the old, lacklustre copies found in the Indian film archives in 2021. Scorcese announced this movie was one of his favourites at its restoration premiere in Italy. The original cinematographer, however, still preferred the analogue version, as he thought it had more texture and character.

It has been popularised as a children's movie and is usually screened on International Children's Day.

The first thing one notices when watching this film is that he feels like a child. Remember the time in our childhood when we were mere observers, watching and learning, seen but not heard? There is hardly any dialogue, but there is never a dull moment. Scene after scene, we are overwhelmed with the fantastic landscape of Kerala's countryside (God's own country). It draws us to a time when life was simple, running to school was fun, playing with friends was exhilarating, and days were long. Every new discovery is a new adventure. It was not so much our own antics that thrilled us; we were fascinated by the peculiarities that adults exhibited.

Chindan and his similarly aged preteen friends have a gala time. They play, run, prank, and observe the world go by. They are particularly drawn to an eccentric shaman who periodically comes to the village, singing and dancing along the way. They suspect the shaman has magic powers. They befriend him. During one of their play sessions, the shaman playfully changes them into animals, such as a monkey, dog, monkey, etcetera. Chindan becomes a dog. Before the shaman can change them back to their usual selves, Chindan is chased by another dog and goes missing.

Chindan's family goes looking for him, but in vain. By that time, the shaman had moved to another village. Chindan's family only brings back the dog; unbeknownst to them, it is actually Chindan.

A year later, the shaman returns to the village. Chindan, the dog, runs to him for an emotional meeting. The shaman recognises the dog and changes him back. Chindan returns home. Understanding the torture of being trapped, he releases his caged pet parakeet to freedom. 

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A historical figure not often mentioned!

Swatantrya Veer Savarkar (Hindi, 2024)

Director: Randeep Hooda

It is funny how names like Savarkar, Bhagat Singh and Subash Chandra Bose escaped our consciousness when we were taught Indian history in school. We were only told of Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian Congress Party and their brand of civil disobedience. Gandhi's passive demeanour, recurrent fasting, and imprisonment eventually won India's Independence. Oh, right! Savarkar and the gang were branded as terrorists and troublemakers, destroying the order, culture and modernity the highly evolved superior race brought to the lost natives. 

Now, we are told of alternative narratives of events that may have happened during the 200 years of the Raj's rule in India. The victors control the narratives, but entertaining the other side of the story is worthwhile. Let us not forget that the immediate reason for the British's sudden exodus from Bharat was not just the bludgeoning British debt to India incurred during WW2 but the Indian Navy Mutiny that kicked out around the time of the trial of captured INA soldiers in 1946.

Savakar has always been and is still labelled a bad boy. He used the word 'Hindutva' way too often to make British and non-Hindus hot under their collar. Even in today's context, the mention of Hindutva brings forth the image of a saffron-donning warrior hoisting a flag with an image of a ferocious-looking Hanuman as a motif. In the eyes of those in opposition to the second-term ruling party BJB, this is a dog whistle for the battle for Hindu domination, a.k.a. Hindutva. 

Not in Savarkar's mind, however. He chose the path of aggression against the invaders. The secret society 'Abhinav Bharat' was his brainchild. It became a nidus for many young spirit men to take arms to assassinate British leaders who wronged Indians. Savarkar looked at Hindutva as a political, geographic, and cultural movement linked to the region from the Sindhu River to the ocean that is Bharat, as it is considered their ancestral land. He used the concept of Hindutva to reel the masses, Hindus and non-Hindus alike, to chase out the invaders. Unfortunately, in modern times, it has taken an oppressive meaning to mean to oppress the minority, the weak and the downtroddden in the fringe of society.

Even as a student at Ferguson College in Pune, he was a rabble-rouser. Being a brilliant student, he managed to secure a place to study law in London with the help of local sponsors who were also quiet revolutionaries. It was in London that he blossomed. He landed in India House in Highgate, the hub for Indian revolutionaries. Famous icons like Madam Cama (who brought India's plight to the Socialist Forum in Stuttgart in 1907 and unveiled India's 'Tricolour' with the word Bande Mataram and logos representing significant religions of India), Madan Lal Dhingra (who assassinated the officers of the Secretary of State for India, Curzon Wyllie) and many other rebels had met Savarkar there. 

Early Tricolour -1907

In 1907, Savarkar wrote 'The War of Independence' in response to Britain's celebrations of the quashing of the 1857 Indian Rebellion. This mutiny also called the Sepoy Mutiny, caused the British to introduce tight gun control and draconian measures to curb Indian resistance. Savakar's book has become the handbook for future Indian freedom fighters who opted for Independence through armed resistance. Savarkar looked at the 1857 mutiny as India's First War for Independence. 

In 1910, Savarkar was arrested for multiple charges, including starting a war against the Crown and was deported to India by sea. When the ship docked at Marseilles, he attempted a dash to freedom but was rearrested and returned to the British after much deliberation. In India, he was sentenced to fifty years at Kala Pani in Andaman Island. The world passed him by. His brother was also jailed on the same island, but they never met till much later. The state confiscated his family property, and his wife, mother, and sisters lived as paupers. Savarkar's degrees were withdrawn. 

By 1921, Savarkar, after writing many petitions after petitions, was transferred to Ratnagiri prison on the mainland. He obtained restricted release by 1924.

He was ideologically opposed to many of Gandhi's proposals. He felt Gandhi and the Congress Party were too appeasing to the British demands. It was no wonder why none of the Congress members were ever jailed in Kala Pani. Gandhi's Sathyagraha movement was oppositional to his violent approach to clinching Independence. Savarkar suggested that Indian youths should partake in British Army training and combats, in contrast to the Quit India movement and Congress's refusal to enlist for war. These exercises, he thought, would be helpful in the Indian War of Independence later. Savarkar was also inimical of the Khilafat movement.

As the head of the Hindu Mahasabha, he allied with the Muslim League to successfully compete in many provincial elections. 

Be careful with whom you pose in a photo.
Here, Savakar (centre) is seated beside Godse
(dark half-jacket)

Savarkar is reputed to have helped to erect the Patit Pavan Mandir when Orthodox Brahmins refused to let Dalits into their temples. It now runs an annual Ganesh festival, which all castes attend.

After Gandhi's assassination in 1948, Savarkar's name was dragged in again. The assassin, Nathuram Godse, was a member of the Hindu Mahasabha and RSS and had allegedly had a meeting just before the said killing. The Kapoor Commission was set up to ascertain his involvement, but the decision was left hanging. Only in 2018 Savarkar's name was erased as the co-conspirator of Gandhi's shooting.

Savarkar died in 1966, soon after his wife's death. He fasted himself to death, refusing food, water and medicines as he felt his work on Earth was done.

The irony of all is that the man of passive resistance, Gandhi, died a violent death. In contrast, Savarkar, who advocated violence as the means to win Independence, died in a relatively passive way without giving a fight.

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We haven't changed!

Emancipation (2022)
Director: Antoine Fuqua

This movie is about an Afro-American slave in Louisana who lived around the 1860s during the American Civil War. A man who never knew his ancestry, age or birth date. His master called him Peter, so Peter he was. All he ever wanted was freedom and to be with his wife and children. What he got was incarceration, and he was transported to slog it out as a manual labourer on the expanding American railway line. Even though he heard about a decree that freed slaves, all he got were abuses and beatings. The photograph of his bare back, laden with keloid-filled scourge-whipped scars, was a selling point for abolitionists. This graphical representation not only manifests the pains the slaves had to endure in the development of the country but also shows the gall a fellow human being would inflict on his own kind. 

Parents tell their children to be kind and loving. The Book instructs us to love one another and that God created us in his own image, but that advice is only applicable to his own kind or the white race.

'Scourged back' of Peter or Gordon (~1863)
The former slave whose photo was
circulated by the Abolitionist Movement
during the American Civil War.

150 years moving forward, are we any wiser? I do not think so. Our wisdom remains skin-deep. We continue beyond one's colour and justify our evil deeds with the selective interpretation of the Book. Despite all these, we are told to stay hopeful and be the change for better things to come.

To appease the woke generation, films like these reinforce the idea that continued racial persecution is the primary reason for the discrepancy in living standards of blacks in America 150 years on. Academicians like Thomas Sowell continue denying this postulate. He vehemently stresses that affirmative action only produces a weak generation.

As a history student at the primary school level, what I grasped from my school books was that people from the North felt terrible for the slaves and wanted to free them. How naive?

In reality, it was all about economics. Abe Lincoln had no undying compassion for the blacks. He had no unending desire to break bread with them or drink with them. He only wanted to free them and pack them off to Africa, maybe Liberia. The South depended heavily on slaves to move their labour-intensive agricultural sectors. Cotton picking and sugarcane production needed much manpower. The South was not willing to surrender their slaves so easily, hence the Civil War.

Unfortunately, even though The Emancipation Bill was passed, the former slaves were ill-prepared to withstand the pressures the Bill brought. Lincoln was assassinated. The blacks had the power but not the ability to partake in deciding their fate. Then came the Ku Klax Klan and their hooded witch-hunts. Jim Crow laws ensued. All these measures did nothing to their well-being. 

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The movie revolves around Peter's escapades as he escapes from the clutches of slavery to the grasp of the guard dog, the jaws of the swamp crocodile, and the end of the barrel of the gun. He was finally rescued by the Union Soldiers and lived to tell his account of his misadventure.

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Bitter pill to swallow!

Aftershock (2022)
Director, Producer: Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis

In the 70s, active labour management was the craze in the Obstetrics circle, especially amongst the countries that looked at the UK as their point of reference. This kind of treatment was first tried out at the Royal Dublin Hospital, promising short labours, lower caesarean section rates and safer outcomes. It soon became the golden standard of managing parturient mothers in most labour rooms.

There had been debates on whether Dublin's figures and definition of labour were only agreeable to some. Many argued that the system tends to over-medicalise something quite natural that people have been doing for aeons. Medical intervention tends to involve surgical intervention, it is alleged. Unfortunately, with eyes constantly scrutinising for clues to stir dirt when a medical outcome is not to their liking, medical practitioners tend to practice defensive medicine. Better be safe than be bogged by handling complications, a battery of legal suits and the threat of being struck off the register.

An often overlooked and unmentioned fact about Dublin's 'active management' is that mothers had a named midwife with them, i.e. a midwife who sees her during pregnancy and through her labour. Labouring mothers are at ease with a familiar face besides their partner. It is said to allay anxiety and generally gives a feeling of achievement. This is why many opt, in the West, at least, for homebirths or at birthing centres.

This documentary is about two maternal deaths which occurred within a short span of time within a locality. In October 2019, a 30-year-old, Shamony Gibson, died two weeks after her delivery of pulmonary embolism. The family allege that her initial symptom of breathlessness during pregnancy and after delivery was trivialised. In the second case, in April 2020, Amber Rose Isaac had to be induced for worsening liver functions and low platelet (HELLP syndrome). She had to undergo an emergency Caesarean Section. Unfortunately, she died on the operating table with extensive haemorrhage. The family was unhappy that the staff were late detecting her medical condition.

One might say it is a medical misadventure. In this time and age, people unfortunately still die during childbirth. Somehow, the BLM (Black Lives Matter) movement needled its head to push for the family to rally to demand justice. They find a disproportionately high number of Black women are failed by the US maternal system. After infiltrating every nook of society, the BLM movement and their leftist friend have something else to stir true.

The widowers of Gibson and Rose Isaac form a strong bond and rally to highlight their plight through rallies. They seek systemic change in the medical system and legislation to ensure proper care.

[PS. One thing often overlooked is that the population is marred with the problem of obesity. Obesity carries high morbidity in any medical condition or intervention. Pregnancy, when the body is in a hypercoagulable state, brings forth even more danger. No medical practitioner worth his salt will ever talk about this to a plus-sized patient for fear of being accused of body shaming.]

[PSS. As medical services become more expensive, compounded by the fear-mongering drive of the pharmaceutical and allied industries. In this increasingly litigious climate, when over-investigation is necessary, medical services are at risk of being exclusive to the rich. The WHO's cry for primary medical attention as a human right remains, at best, can be only given at the bare minimum. Restricting expensive treatment to the deservingly ill but can ill afford is the bitter pill to swallow. Sadly the patients who need the therapy most are those not financially able to pay. The bow has to break somewhere]

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The sweet smell of freedom

Swathanthryam Ardharathriyil (Malayalam, Freedom at Night; 2018)

In terms of world cinema, this movie not score high on the scale of creativity. As far as Indian cinema is concerned, at least one given to minute details to the storyline, this would be number one.

Like Papillon and Shawshank Redemption, this film centres around the planning and the execution of a jailbreak.  The first quarter of the movie shows the circumstances upon which the hero gets imprisoned. In prison, he plots his prison break after recruiting his accomplices. There is not a dull moment as the storyteller managed to fill up the story with characters with compelling backstories. The props look real, and the actors are made scruffy and muscular enough to fit the bill of hardcore criminals. The fights look authentic and short enough to get the message. The music suits the situation, and the escape plan appears believable enough. There are a few failures and sudden changes of plan to hold the suspense. 

The inmates' plan is to dig their way out of their bunks to get to the outside of the prison complex and subsequently escape by boarding the midnight train, hence the title 'Freedom at midnight'. The only thing that kind of defies logic is how they managed to wash that amount of sand and dirt down their tiny toilet. Indeed it would have clogged up in no time.

Besides that tiny faux pas, it was a good attempt at procedural drama. 3.5/5.

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Freedom and liberation?

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Everybody yearns to be free. They want to be liberated. They dream of eudaimonia. Sadly, their search for bliss is anything but fulfilling.

When we are young, we long for the time when we are adults and do not have to play to the whims and fancies of our parents or to bow to societal pressures. We thought we had to conform, as a payback measure to our parents to all the food, accommodation and care rendered in our teething years.

Then we get our keys at 21, and we thought that is it - our path to unleashing the caged animal within us. With education came conformity and decorum. With a life partner came mutual respect, reciprocity, tolerance, empathy till death do us apart. With the expansion of the family tree, came commitments, responsibility and leadership by example.

The elusive freedom and liberation just slither us by. We tell us that is just the circle of life. We still bear hope of release from the shackles in the horizon, and we straddle along.

Cornered at a wall, we ask questions, when will rescue come? At senescence, perhaps? We seek solace with people who possess wisdom, supposedly. They raise more queries with their elusive double-tongued talk. Maybe, they themselves are equally in the dark. They escape embarrassment via their non-committal double-headed didelphian speech.

We tell ourselves to suck it up, for the uncertainties were sins of past doing and that we still had time to rectify the next birth. We labour through. More trials and tribulation are hurled at us. We accept graciously. It is an appraisal to probe our conviction and faith. We falter, and our partner does. We take it in our stride. Oh freedom, oh liberty, where art thou?

Will they come when we are free from our worldly duties? Or is it when we separate from our earthly bodies? Perhaps only when we are free from the cruel cycle of rebirth?

https://asok22.wixsite.com/real-lesson

The right to offend and be offended

http://www.familytrek.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/DI-I-offend-you.jpg

I saw a video clip recently on the social media. It took place within the confines of an underground train. A mother was seen nursing her infant in a sparsely occupied coach. She was admonished for exposing herself in public. The man who accused her of public indecency insisted that his liberty of not wanting to see a naked lady had been denied. Slowly, the fellow passengers joined to support the lactating mother, but the man stood his ground. He accused her of not bothering about how others would feel seeing a naked breast in plain view. The argument went on for some time till it was time for one of them to disembark.

A few months ago, a Muslim man is a Hindu-majority village in India was lynched to death when the village holy man announced that a particular occupant was in possession of beef. A mob, primarily vegans who thought that by controlling their cravings for blood and meat would be able to reach eternal bliss and be one with God, decided to ambush the Musalman's abode and make mince meat out of him.

So, there is a dilemma between what is offensive and when it acceptable to feel offended? Is it all right to offend another as it is an individual's right to do what he wants? Is it not also a person's right not to be ridiculed of his practices and be offended? The world community has agreed that every human creation has been bestowed upon him certain rights. Hence, by right, he should be able to demand those things that are due to him. But, only he alone is entitled to human rights, not the person he is offending?

On the other hand, feeling offended is the story of humanity. This offence drives him to strive harder. The natives who felt offended by the antics of their colonial master for treating them as sub-human were the driving force that pushed them to strive harder to squash the yoke of colonisation. This inferiority complex pushed humanity forward to fight orthodoxy.

Are we mollycoddling the minority or the vulnerable by giving them an umbrella of protection by shielding them from the reality of the world? Perhaps we should reflect upon these two quotations:

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

~Eleanor Roosevelt

“Avoiding offense means that we don't accept each other as equals.”

~Ayaan Hirsi Ali (activist, reformist, opponent of FGM)