Skip to main content

Virtue of Crookedness

 


When someone put up a spoof on the protagonist of the Drishyam movie in a WhatsApp group of some family members, I commented to ask whether the name of the protagonist has become synonymous with crookedness. One member, whose father’s name is the same as the protagonist’s, took offence. It was then that I wondered whether crookedness was a virtue or a vice.

If crookedness was a vice, the protagonist would not have been celebrated as a hero. He would be a villain. Instead the movie as well as its sequel was a giga-hit in Kerala and its Hindi version was a huge box-office hit too. Both Drishyam 1 and 2 are celebrations of crookedness. So is crookedness a virtue or a vice?

What makes the protagonist an adorable hero to the hundreds of thousands of people who loved the two movies is not his love for his family but his ingeniousness – his crookedness, in plain words. Innocence is adorable in children. But it is fatal in adults. It will destroy adults. That is why even Jesus counsels his followers to be as cunning as the serpents [Mathew 10:16]. Jesus compares ordinary people to wolves. Good people are compared to sheep. Tough to survive if you are a sheep because the wolves are just waiting to pounce on you. Armour yourself with crookedness.

That is just what the protagonist of the Drishyam movies does. If you think he is a hero, as the vast majority of Malayalis obviously did, you will have to admit that crookedness is a virtue. And if I say that you are a crooked person, you should be proud.

Why did a young member in my family react so negatively to my unintended innuendo on his father’s name being a synonym of crookedness? That is the typical hypocrisy of ordinary people, I think. We find it hard to accept crookedness as a virtue because our naïve catechism classes and plebeian morality have placed innocence on the high pedestal. We love to imagine ourselves as the sheep and others as wolves. I belong to the pack of wolves anyway. Beware, I’m ready to pounce.

 

 

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanDecember 13, 2021 at 10:37 PM

    Hari OM
    I have noticed a plethora of so-called entertainments arise on television and film which seem to glorify the character who would once have been called the villain of the piece. A sign of how society has twisted? Certainly addressing the baser instincts of the human race... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 14, 2021 at 6:49 AM

      I'm not an authority on this since I hardly watch TV programs except news. Nor am I a movie buff. But I sense that there is some glorification of negative characters. However, in the movies cited in this post the protagonist had no choice but exercise all the crookedness available. When the state machinery becomes too oppressive, what can an ordinary person do? Succumb or bring into play his skills?

      Delete
  2. parwatisingariDecember 14, 2021 at 11:31 AM

    Interesting. But good and bad are all relative aren't they?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 14, 2021 at 12:00 PM

      Of course. Just look at people arrested on charges of treason, for example. If they possessed a fraction of the crookedness of our politicians, they would be free people today. So what's good, what's evil, in today's India? Fair is foul and foul is fair...

      Delete
    2. Online JournalistDecember 14, 2021 at 3:18 PM

      I also agree with your point, 'fair is foul and foul is fair' now. We see now-a-days even on medias how they glorify criminals and ignore fair ones!
      May be because of the 'kalikala vaibhavam'!

      Delete
    3. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 14, 2021 at 6:57 PM

      Times are bad and art reflects reality.

      Delete
  3. जितेन्द्र माथुरDecember 14, 2021 at 1:09 PM

    I have seen Drishyam and there's nothing which suggests that the hero can be called a villain. His crookedness is for the sake of survival of himself and his family members who, by applying the principle of natural justice, are innocent by all means. Hence, I agree with you in part. It's not advisable or desirable to be a sheep but being a wolf for the sake of own protection only is acceptable and not for the sake of hurting / eliminating some innocent one.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 14, 2021 at 1:58 PM

      Yes, no doubt we shouldn't pounce on others unnecessarily. I gave that conclusion rather provocatively. When my wife read it she burst out laughing and said, You pouncing on others - what a joke!

      Delete
  4. Rajeev MoothedathDecember 18, 2021 at 7:36 PM

    My wife also felt that Drishyam 2 showed the man more as a crook while Drishyam 1 was okay. However, what he has done in both versions is simply to protect his family from the mighty and powerful...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 18, 2021 at 10:29 PM

      Drishyam 2 has too neat a plot to be credible. Nevertheless I enjoyed the movie just for the cleverness in it.

      Delete

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
47 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
18 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more