Skip to main content

Heart of Darkness

Watching the recently released Malayalam movie, Jallikattu, was a painful experience much as the movie was hilarious. The film has nothing to do with the savage entertainment by the same name indulged in by some people in Tamil Nadu. The film is about the savagery that lies deep inside the human heart.

Man is a beast, far more evil than the wildest beast in the forest. The movie tears apart the facade of sophistication that we have put up to conceal our intrinsic savagery. A buffalo escapes from the butcher's sledge hammer and runs amok. How the people of the village react to the situation is what the movie is all about.

Violence reeks right from the beginning to the last scene. The killing of a buffalo by a butcher who cuts up the flesh into lumps that are suspended on hooks in the meat shop is the revolting scene that ushers you into the terrifying and simultaneously hilarious darkness that follows.

Soon you are made to realise that the darkness actually lies within you. You become part of the mad crowds that run after  the buffalo with various motives. Many are greedy for the flesh. Most revel in the cruelty being inflicted on the animal both physically and psychologically. Even the local parish priest who orders 3 kg of beef from another butcher (since this buffalo's fate is uncertain) is a caricature of contemporary religiosity.

The priest and the police, the leaders and their followers, all are butchers at heart. You are there too in one of those crowds, you realise again and again.

You can be part of the lynch mob without being physically present among the savages. Savagery lies in the heart. If the darkness out there - in the lynchings, to stick to the allegory - doesn't arouse your indignation, you are very much there, right in the midst of the savage mob. The ideology you preach from there - nationalism or whatsoever - is bound to be painful and hilarious at once. 

Comments

  1. The movie is a classic example of subjective comedy. It lays bare the rotten society's double standard. But I deplore the portrayal of women in the movie.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I don't think Pellissery has been particularly sexist or anything of the sort. He is equally ruthless with both the genders, isn't he?

      Delete
  2. Thanks for sharing useful info !! Please Also visit West End Butcher Shop

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Dopamine

Fiction Mathai went to the kitchen and picked up a glass. The TV was screening a program called Ask the Doctor . “Dopamine is a sort of hormone that gives us a feeling of happiness or pleasure,” the doc said. “But the problem with it is that it makes us want more of the same thing. You feel happy with one drink and you obviously want more of it. More drink means more happiness…” That’s when Mathai went to pick up his glass and the brandy bottle. It was only morning still. Annamma, his wife, had gone to school as usual to teach Gen Z, an intractable generation. Mathai had retired from a cooperative bank where he was manager in the last few years of his service. Now, as a retired man, he took to watching the TV. It will be more correct to say that he took to flicking channels. He wanted entertainment, but the films and serial programs failed to make sense to him, let alone entertain. The news channels were more entertaining. Our politicians are like the clowns in a circus, he thought...

The Vegetarian

Book Review Title: The Vegetarian Author: Han Kang Translator: Deborah Smith [from Korean] Publisher: Granta, London, 2018 Pages: 183 Insanity can provide infinite opportunities to a novelist. The protagonist of Nobel laureate Han Kang’s Booker-winner novel, The Vegetarian , thinks of herself as a tree. One can argue with ample logic and conviction that trees are far better than humans. “Trees are like brothers and sisters,” Yeong-hye, the protagonist, says. She identifies herself with the trees and turns vegetarian one day. Worse, she gives up all food eventually. Of course, she ends up in a mental hospital. The Vegetarian tells Yeong-hye’s tragic story on the surface. Below that surface, it raises too many questions that leave us pondering deeply. What does it mean to be human? Must humanity always entail violence? Is madness a form of truth, a more profound truth than sanity’s wisdom? In the disturbing world of this novel, trees represent peace, stillness, and nonviol...

Dine in Eden

If you want to have a typical nonvegetarian Malayali lunch or dinner in a serene village in Kerala, here is the Garden of Eden all set for you at Ramapuram [literally ‘Abode of Rama’] in central Kerala. The place has a temple each for Rama and his three brothers: Lakshmana, Bharata, and Shatrughna. It is believed that Rama meditated in this place during his exile and also that his brothers joined him for a while. Right in the heart of the small town is a Catholic church which is an imposing structure that makes an eloquent assertion of religious identity. Quite close to all these religious places is the Garden of Eden, Eden Thoppu in Malayalam, a toddy shop with a difference. Toddy is palm wine, a mild alcoholic drink collected from palm trees. In my childhood, toddy was really natural; i.e., collected from palm trees including coconut trees which are ubiquitous in Kerala. My next-door neighbours, two brothers who lived in the same house, were toddy-tappers. Toddy was a health...