Why this kolaveri da?

An unarmed girl hacked to death in broad daylight by a spurned lover stalker. Peeling off one more layer, let’s look a bit at the individuals involved. The victim was employed in a leading software company. The stalker was an engineering drop out with little else going for him besides this one sided amorous pursuit. Her crime? Spurning the advances of a sociopath.

It is a fine line that separates fantasy from reality. And it is a scary thought that the youth of today – not all of them, of course –so easily go astray and cross that line with no thought about the consequences. I’m trying to make sense of what his intentions were in following her. Did he really fancy his chances with her? Assuming for argument’s sake that she had reciprocated his feelings for her, did he ever ponder what then? Remember, she was at the threshold of a career and by all reports, he was already an absolute failure.

From the news reports, it looks that his friends have stoked his desires and he may have been encouraged to pursue her by his peers. The fact that she had not reported him to her dad – for fear of being curtailed I’d imagine rather than out of any romantic interests – have apparently emboldened him. And finally when she had called a spade a spade, he loses the plot and takes it upon himself to teach her a lesson that goes horribly wrong.

Anger from rejection is a natural human emotion. But channelizing that anger to improve oneself is so passé. Teaching a lesson on the other hand – a la Rajinikant the shrew tamer – is cool! I hate to oversimplify this situation and lay the entire blame at the doorstep of Tamil cinema. But it is hard to overlook the role of movies in incidents like these. Do movies reflect society or does society imbibe from cinema is a debate for another day. But it is fair to assume that cinema today has a strong influence on the youth.

Let’s face it. The hero from a humble background winning the hands of the princess is a horse that has been flogged down the ages on celluloid. In earlier times, the hero was unfailingly depicted as a fundamentally good person that rose from the lower rungs of the society and rebelled against the ruling class. The love was (of course) incidental and merely a vehicle to question class distinctions and bring about societal change. The romance, more often than not initiated from the girl's side, was boringly clean and always ended in sweet union. In other words, even a kid knew it was a story. No sane person could identify themselves with any of the onscreen characters. 

Let’s take a look at how the role of the hero has evolved. There was the period that glorified suicides spawned by "love failure". Or giving oneself liver sclerosis when spurned. But today, when movie makers vie with one another to portray "reality", the need to portray positive values has become one of the first victims. Besides the humble background, today's cine male has nothing in common with the ones from the black and white era. He has a highly inflated sense of entitlement and pretty much nothing else. He is a flawed rebel without a cause, qualifications, values or even the looks for that matter. An academic failure? No problem. Completely incompatible with the girl culturally and economically? No problem again. The narrative is one that gives him the entitlement to any girl’s love interest only because he desired so, no matter what. After all, “engala maari pasangala paatha odaney pidikkadhu. Paakka paakka dhaan pidikkum”, right? (Loose translation: we are an acquired taste.)

In this synthetic reality where his shortcomings are his qualifications and greed is a virtue, the lady’s rejection then becomes a classist slap on the face of an entire section of society. Choosing a more compatible guy is casteism masquerading as choice! In other words, the girl (or her family) knows nothing, should have no preferences of her own whatsoever and her choices simply don’t matter. The knight in shining armor – warts and all – shath set everything in order with his love en route to a happily lived ever after. The flawed man’s misplaced desires are here and here to stay.

Cinema has always been guilty of airbrushing reality to reel in audiences but now the consequences are becoming more lethal. Combine that with the sorry fact that strong values are not instilled into youth at every opportunity (family, schools, colleges), girls and their families unjustly bear the burden of a few men getting high on flawed narratives and running amok when hit by reality.

I hate Kamal Hassan the actor and nowadays even the individual. But I remember and like one of his earlier interviews where he advises the audiences to watch a movie strictly for entertainment and brush off its influences as soon as one steps out of the theater. Sounds so right.