The Courage to be Tender

Chinna, Chinna Asai - movie poster

Chinna Chinna Asai is a new Malayalam-Tamil bilingual movie that I watched yesterday. This film is marked by a quality that’s quite rare today in the industry. It enters our hearts and leaves us with a renewed faith in humanity.

At its heart lies a simple yet profound truth: human life is essentially vulnerable.

Leela is a 52-year-old woman from Tamil Nadu who is apparently lost from her group that is visiting Varanasi. Later we come to know that she intentionally left the group in which she felt quite alien. In fact, Leela feels alienated from the whole world. No one other than her father ever loved her.

When her purse and phone are stolen, she feels utterly helpless in a place whose language is totally alien to her. So, she is forced to accept the assistance offered by Mahadevan, a retired schoolteacher from Kerala, who is in Varanasi because his daughter is learning Kathak dance there.

The movie has been described by a few critics as “a poem in celluloid.” That is an apt description and beautiful as well. There is nothing called a plot in the movie. Yet we never feel bored. We watch with unwavering interest Leela and Mahadevan moving from place to place in Varanasi more in search of Leela’s psychological depths than the group which she abandoned but requires for her return journey the next day.

Leela’s personal story puts us in a heart-to-heart contact with human frailties and vulnerabilities. There is no greater agony, perhaps, than a never-requited longing to love and to be loved. And that’s Leela’s problem, in short.

Mahadevan, on the other hand, is quite a contented person though his wife had died long ago, just a year and a half after their wedding. “We hardly lived together,” he says, “except for 6 or 7 months. Then there was the pregnancy, consequent separation, the delivery… and then her death.” But Mahadevan could successfully accept life’s inevitable ups and downs. He has a loving daughter and her loving family. Moreover, he has a caring heart that makes no distinction between people in the name of religion, language, and so on.

The relationship that builds up slowly – at snail’s pace, in fact –  between Mahadevan and Leela is the entire poetry of the film. That relationship is founded on the understanding and acceptance of life’s essential loneliness, frailty, disappointments, uncertainty… Vulnerability is not an accident of life; it is the very condition of being human.

Tenderness is what makes life bearable in spite of all that. Mahadevan is a personification of that tenderness. Tenderness is often seen as a weakness in today’s world that admires ‘strength.’ This movie shows us that tenderness is the real strength: strength stripped of aggression. It is the courage to touch another life without possessing it, to comfort without judging, to understand without demanding explanations.

A Still from the Movie

Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas argued that ethics begins when we encounter the face of another person. When we are able to see the vulnerable face’s silent demand from us not to turn away, our ethics begins. That ethics is kind of supernatural. It is that ethics or that supernaturality we experience in this movie as its poetry.

Varsha Vasudev, writer and director of the movie, chose Varanasi as the setting for this movie intentionally. Where else would you find life’s ultimate vulnerability so vividly than in a city where corpses burn continually, ceaselessly, on funeral pyres. Varanasi is the Gateway to Moksha (Liberation), according to Hindu faith. There are people who go there precisely to die.

Varanasi is the eternal abode of Lord Shiva whose another name is Mahadeva, the deity of death and regeneration. Death is a public affair in this historical city. The smoke from the burning wood blends with the air of the city. A few metres away from the pyres, people perform morning prayers, wash clothes, and children sell puja accessories. There are sages and thieves and tourists. The boundary between the sacred and the macabre is not drawn – cannot be drawn in Varanasi.

Leela, in Hindu theology, means ‘divine play.’ The universe and everything that happens in it is seen as God’s divine play or cosmic sport. This movie brings us a slice of that divine sport aesthetically.

A Personal Note

Just a few minutes before Maggie and I left home for the movie, a message landed on my WhatsApp from a friend who said that he felt like an utter failure in life. A series of failures, he said, is what his life is.

During the intermission of the movie, I checked the phone again for new messages. And there was another, from a person who is very dear to me… The message read: “Funny question: are you interested in writing a novel based on my life?” The question wasn’t funny, I knew. Just the opposite.

These two messages together made me reflect deeply on the movie – and this post is a result of that.

Order your copy here