Monday, January 5, 2009

Abhiyum Naanum -- Is Radha Mohan's viewpoint right?

"Everyone is an individual... So just because you are an individual's parent, don't try to control his/her life" -- this is the crux of Abhiyum Naanum and I'm sure this is not a spoiler because Radha Mohan himself has stated this in the press meet. When I saw this movie a couple of days back, the first thing that ran in my mind was to blog about the movie, not in the usual "Wow! Radha Mohan rocks... Hats off to Prakashraj" tone; but to analyze the point he made in the movie.

Well... West believes in this independence of individuals concept and we practically see what is happening with them. I'm not a basher in anyway and with all due respect to their culture and tradition, we see that the western society is just falling apart and a strongly knit family is becoming a rarity here. One simple reason behing that - independence. One of my lecturers at college often uses the sentence "There is a difference between freedom and independence" and when it comes to relationships and family, the latter is diabolic. Mom, dad, brother, sister, husband, wife or any other relationship that man has defined relies on the mutual respect and bond for each other. When the freedom crosses the limit and makes this bond insignificant then there is no point in having that freedom at all. After all, won't a father really understand the needs of his kids? I'm not saying that parents are always right. I'm just saying that they have all the rights on the earth to make sure you are taking the right path. If they are not convinced about your path, either make them understand or don't take that path at all. But I'd never accept the statement that parents are nothing more than two humans who mated and gave birth to somebody; and beyond that point that somebody is a completely different individual. If we are down to that level of practicality in relationships, then we are better off going back to the good old days of nomadic life than being a part of a completely mechanical, loosely knit, baseless society.

Another point made in the movie... Grand weddings alone consume about 2000 crores of money per year in India. If so, then that is the happiest news one can hear because a wedding is not a one man show. Caterers, Maids, Decorators, Photographers, Videographers, Property owners, Car companies, Flower sellers, Fireworks factories, Grocers, Printers, you name it. Almost every segment of the economic society gets benefited in a marriage. What kind of an economic genius (who is close to the PM perhaps because he is a Sardar) will ignore such a huge capital flowing into the society? After all, isn't this consumption driven self-sustained economy the need of the hour?

Third comes the exaggeration part of it. If reality is portrayed as such in a story or a movie, chances are that it doesn't seem too interesting. So friends are turned into lovers, bruises are turned into surgeries and 100s are turned into 100,000s when it comes to movies. That's acceptable. But trying to defend a weak and meek storyline with exaggerations is something I never expected from Radha Mohan. Whether it is the pre-KG interview/admission scene or the 'shouting from the boat at midnight' scene or the scenes where Trisha almost acts like a stranger in her own house, Radha Mohan miserably fails and the worst part comes in the form of Manobala, Thalaivasal Vijay, his wife (I wonder if she has a dialog in the movie) are completely useless in the movie apart from the 'jaalra' scenes where they say the sardarji turned all their lives into beautiful blooming roses.

Except for a very few niche Radha Mohan scenes, Abhiyum Naanum as Srini rightly mentioned could be considered a movie from the director of Ponniyin Selvan and not from the director of Mozhi...

All in all, Abhiyum Naanum was not a bad movie; but it failed to impress me both in terms of the tag line and in terms of a Duet movies -Radha Mohan combo...

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