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
47 comments
Read more

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...
19 comments
Read more

Insecurity and Exclusivism

“ Hindu khatare mein hai.” This was one of the first slogans that accompanied the emergence of Narendra Modi on the national scene. It means Hindus are in Danger . It reveals a deep-rooted feeling of insecurity. Hindus constitute an overwhelming majority in India – 80%. All the high positions in governance, judiciary, academics, any significant place, are occupied by Hindus. Yet the slogan was born. Strange? It will be facile to argue that Modi used this slogan and its concomitant hatred of Muslims and Christians as a political weapon for winning votes. True, he was successful in that; he rose to the highest political post in the country using minority-bashing. But the hatred did not end with that achievement; rather it spread outward and became more exclusive. Muslim and European rulers of India were booted out from the country’s history books and wherever else possible like the names of roads and institutions. With vengeance. Now there is a concerted effort going on to place In...
10 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

You Don’t Know the Sky

I asked the bird to lend me wings. I longed to fly like her. Gracefully. She tilted her head and said, “Wings won’t be of any use to you because you don’t know the sky.” And she flew away. Into the sky. For a moment, I was offended. What arrogance! Does she think she owns the sky? As I watched the bird soar effortlessly into the blue vastness, I began to see what she meant. I wanted wings, not the flight. Like wanting freedom without the responsibility that comes with it. The bird had earned her wings. Through storms, through hunger, through braving the odds. She manoeuvred her way among the missiles that flew between invisible borders erected by us humans. She witnessed the macabre dance of death that brought down cities, laid waste a whole country. Wings are about more than flights. How often have you perched on the stump of a massive tree brought down by a falling warhead and wept looking at the debris of civilisations? The language of the sky is different from tha...
13 comments
Read more