Sometimes silence overpowers noise!

Kottukkaali (The Adamant Girl, Tamil; 2024)

Director: P.S. Vinothraj

What do you do when your young daughter becomes catatonic, refuses to speak or eat, stares into oblivion and is hellbent on marrying her equally young boyfriend? You tell her that her choice of boyfriend is inappropriate and that she is way too young to be committed. That she is destined to achieve much more in life; she retreats and refuses to respond and goes all silent; what do you do? Perhaps you would sit down as a family and reason with her. Get a mental health professional involved. Words like puppy love, teenage angst, stress and even bipolar disease would be thrown into the ring.

What do Paandi, his sister, and the rest of the family members do when Paandi's sister's daughter, Meena, goes silent and says she is in love with her friend, who is not approved by the family? Paandi was supposed to marry his niece; it is legitimate in that part of interior Tamil Nadu. The whole family feels that Meena is under a spell. They go on a journey to see a holy man who would break the spell. En route, they would stop at a local deity temple. The whole story is told through this journey. In fact, a good hour into the movie, viewers are clueless about who is who and what is happening. It is all about self-exploration through cinematic experience. No wonder it got a raving review at the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival.

One can pick up many easter eggs as the movie progresses. At that start, we see a cockerel tied to a stone at one of its legs to prevent it from fleeing. We can see it standing on one leg, struggling to pitch the kick of the rope away from its other leg. In fact, this is what the main character, Meena, is doing. In the Tamil lingo, when someone is said to be standing on one leg, he is said to be stubborn or adamant. Hence, the title. An adamant person would kick away the obstacles that bog him down and move along.

The men in the story control everything. They tell the ladies what to do and even where to sit. In this patriarchal society, they are in charge. They know the best route to the places they need, when to go there and all the stops on the way. They can revive a dehydrated rooster and keep peace. They soon realise that diseases of the mind are beyond comprehension.

An angry bull parks itself on a country road, obstructing their path. Being farmers, they thought shooing the bull away was child's play. Not really, they realised. The nearer they went, the angrier the bulls became. The crow could land on its hump without creating a ruckus. All it finally took was its owner's daughter, a pre-pubescent girl, to pull the bull away. 

Not everything can be put in place with a stick and rod, so we need to dangle a carrot. We need the correct person to perform the proper duties. A snake charmer cannot tame a tiger. If a holy man can solve the problems of the nerves, so be it. 

We exert our authority and sell our ideas by just shouting and raising our voices. Sometimes, we realise we cannot overpower silence. Toxic masculinity cannot win over feminine silence.

The party finally reached their destination. After witnessing another client being exorcised, Paandi is not so sure his niece should undergo such a treatment. The ending is left to our imagination. It's a good movie; 4.5/5. See a comedian transform into a character actor. Also, learn a new film genre—road movie. 

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The road to success is fraught with misconceptions?

Outliers, The Story of Success
Author: Malcolm Gladwell (2008)

Life had never been easy. Now it has been made more complicated. Kids all around the world had been fed with the idea that if you put in the hours and do as you are told, your future would be bliss. Nah, don’t buy that!

The secret to success still remains an enigma. Many factors affect the success of an individual. The author goes through the lives of a few successful people and a few who had the potential but did not quite make it.

One has to be born at the correct time. Sometimes the window of opportunity only comes once. One has to be of the proper state of mind and of the right age to grasp it. At the spur of the time when it happens, he must be willing to put in the long hours. That indulgence itself, an awful lot of hours, would determine your future success. The examples of Beatles and Bill Gates are mentioned here. Beatles' acid test was in Hamburg in 1962 when they took the challenge of playing long hours despite the difficulty. Computer maestros were obsessed with the new gadget to know it inside out. 

Of course, social strata of the individual’s family makes an impact. A rich kid has all the exposure, a parent who is willing enough to ferry him around, who would identify his aptitude, give him the coaching to be confident and assertive and to create an environment suitable for his goal.

However, the poor, if given the push in the right direction, would prosper. There, however, must be a concerted effort on the part of the individual, his family and perhaps the administrators and the governing bodies to organise appropriate platforms. The zest to succeed must also come from the individual.

The author goes on to analyse a few air crashes and to suggest that possibly cultural aspects played a minor but relevant role in them. He proffered the idea of Power Distance Index (PDI) - the measure of existence of hierarchy in a society, how it is accepted by a particular community and how it affects day to day conversation, particularly in life-threatening situations like a plane crash. A child nurtured in affluence would probably be more self-confident and assertive in getting his way around. One in a family taught to conform to authority or growing up in a dysfunctional environment may end up not trusting people in power and hence losing out many chances laid in front of him.

A lengthy discussion on PDI resulting from a cultural background as a contributing factor to plane crashes is put forward. Cultures which tend to hold people in high esteem (i.e. high PDI index) tend not to tell off their bosses when they are wrong and fail to exert their authority when needed. This had led to disastrous outcomes in many cases.

Unfortunately, I think the one on which he tries to explain the superiority of Chinese students in Mathematics as being too simplistic. He asserts that the labour intensive, highly skilled, lengthy duration of rice duration as well as the simplicity in the pronunciation of numbers as the reason for their excellence. He compares this to short planting days in the West and the shorter days there. Maybe he is saying that this may have engrained in the genetic level as many of these students are no longer planters' kids. And Singapore is hardly a farming society.

This dilemma is nothing new. Scholars from the Indian subcontinent, for aeons, have been trying to understand this conundrum - why two people develop and perform differently from each other. They try to invoke the time of birth, to place planetary positions as well as the constellation to predict the personality and aptitude of an individual towards a particular field. Unfortunately, it is not specific. Hence, its sensitivity is questionable.

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

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