Skip to main content

Truth and Justice


Maggie and I decided to watch a movie during this weeklong Christmas break from school. Our natural choice was Neru, Malayalam movie directed by the illustrious Jeethu Joseph of Drishyam (dubbed or remade successfully into many Indian languages including Hindi) fame. Neru means truth. The movie is about both truth and justice both of which are inextricably intertwined and neither of which is quite available nowadays, especially in a country where the values of the Mahabharat war are upheld as just. And what is that value: everything is fair in war, and life is a perpetual war.

Sara, a young blind girl, is raped in her house in Thiruvananthapuram by Michael Joseph, son of an affluent Malayali businessman in Mumbai. Sara, being an exceptionally gifted sculptor, makes a lifelike bust of the rapist which helps in the prompt arrest of the culprit. The police officer who arrests Michael is soon relieved of his charge. This is India, after all. Everything is fair in life’s war here provided you have the wealth to buy that fairness. The rest of the movie is a question hurled at that popular assumption of today’s India: is everything really fair in life even if it is a metaphorical war?

Michael’s father rushes from Mumbai with his immense wealth and the best lawyer. Michael knows that wealth and political influence (which is readily available if you have the monies) will get him freedom sooner rather than later. This is not his first rape case anyway. “But this is Kerala, not Mumbai,” his father reminds his mother who insists on getting his son out on bail promptly.

The system is not too different in Kerala either. Politicians aren’t very different whether they are from Kerala or Gujarat. But this movie is slightly different from the others of the kind insofar as it doesn’t involve politicians explicitly. Here the lawyers take over the role of politicians. Advocate Rajashekar will lead the war and show us with the aplomb of Patriarch Bhishma that dharma is so subtle that it can be manipulated pretty easily. This advocate possesses also the intellectual acumen of Krishna. So Sudarshana Chakra and Gandiva and all sorts of legal arms and arrows will fly in the court.

The victim’s side has its own avatar of Karna, advocate Vijayamohan, who was discredited by the crooked dharma-strategies of Rajashekar many years ago. In this movie’s epic war, Karna wins.

This is my personal application of the epic to this movie. The movie makes absolutely no reference to any character from Mahabharata. The good vs evil theme in the movie made me impose some parallels.

I have wished time and again that Karna should have been the real hero of Mahabharata. He possessed the virtues required for a hero. But why did the creator of that epic discredit Karna? The answer is obvious: the requirement of the system. The creators of the system should win in the end. It is they who win in real life. Jeethu Joseph is making a movie and hence the good has to win, truth has to win, justice has to prevail.

If truth and justice don’t prevail, what good is art, right?  

Labels:

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanDecember 27, 2023 at 11:55 PM

    Hari OM
    The equivalent, for your western readers, would be the David v Goliath thing ... the hashtag me too movement. Yes, in art we can have fairytale endings, but the truth is that the greater number of any such case is lost by those against whom the offence was made, if the offender is of status and money. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 28, 2023 at 6:17 AM

      When the present dispensation came we in India hoped for a change for the better. But what we got is the terrible deviousness of the Kurukshetra!

      Delete
  2. CloudiaDecember 28, 2023 at 2:12 AM

    May good win and bring peace with it!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Liz A.December 28, 2023 at 5:58 AM

    Interesting premise for a movie. Very true to life.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Lux G.December 28, 2023 at 12:30 PM

    Yes to that. What good indeed. I like stories that get you thinking like this.

    ReplyDelete
  5. rupam sarmaDecember 28, 2023 at 12:43 PM

    Thanks for your review, Not yet watch Neru, will watch soon.

    ReplyDelete
  6. AnonymousJanuary 4, 2024 at 4:42 PM

    I too recently watched this in theatres.i am a huge fan of crime and thriller. Film made me emotional. Great sequence of dialog and plot

    ReplyDelete
  7. CareenaJanuary 15, 2024 at 8:24 PM

    If truth and justice don't prevail, what good is art, indeed!!! I have not seen this movie but i will be. The most profund line here was about how subtle Dharma is that it can be twisted. I find that so, so true. And tragic.

    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
44 comments
Read more

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The
62 comments
Read more

Country without a national language

India has no national language because the country has too many languages. Apart from the officially recognised 22 languages are the hundreds of regional languages and dialects. It would be preposterous to imagine one particular language as the national language in such a situation. That is why the visionary leaders of Independent India decided upon a three-language policy for most purposes: Hindi, English, and the local language. The other day two pranksters from the Hindi belt landed in Bengaluru airport wearing T-shirts declaring Hindi as the national language. They posted a picture on X and it evoked angry responses from a lot of Indians who don’t speak Hindi.  The worthiness of Hindi to be India’s national language was debated umpteen times and there is nothing new to add to all that verbiage. Yet it seems a reminder is in good place now for the likes of the above puerile young men. Language is a power-tool . One of the first things done by colonisers and conquerors is to
14 comments
Read more

Diwali, Gifts, and Promises

Diwali gifts for me! This is the first time in my 52 years of existence that I received so many gifts in the name of Diwali.  In Kerala, where I was born and brought up, Diwali was not celebrated at all in those days, the days of my childhood.  Even now the festival is not celebrated in the villages of Kerala as I found out from my friends there.  It is celebrated in the cities (and some villages) where people from North Indian states live.  When I settled down in Delhi in 2001 Diwali was a shock to me.  I was sitting in the balcony of a relative of mine who resided in Sadiq Nagar.  I was amazed to see the fireworks that lit up the city sky and polluted the entire atmosphere in the city.  There was a medical store nearby from which I could buy Otrivin nasal drops to open up those little holes in my nose (which have been examined by many physicians and given up as, perhaps, a hopeless case) which were blocked because of the Diwali smoke.  The festivals of North India
50 comments
Read more

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so
39 comments
Read more