Holy cow
Tamils have certain rituals. What appears perplexing or perfectly disgusting to others is heavenly to us, and we swear life isn’t worth living without it. For instance, we take some rice, mash it all up, add some yoghurt to it, mash it up some more, and then we stuff our faces with it. We like our heroines with some fat on their thighs and our heroes with some hair, well, everywhere really. And we like directors called Mani Ratnam. Because that’s what we do.
If you were a kid during the 80s and 90s, you’ll remember your first Mani Ratnam movie. It’s probably different for different generations – Agni Natchatram, Nayakan, Thalapathy, Roja, whatever. It was the only movie you’d ever seen which had dialogues like “odi poyidalama?” It had jokes your parents didn’t want you to get, and the odd song they wished you wouldn’t hum. But even they couldn’t hide their enthusiasm when a new Mani movie was released. Ratnam’s movies were among the few I could be certain about watching in the theaters, instead of waiting for a decade or so for Doordarshan to stoop down and broadcast it.
I feel duty bound to hate all holy cows. They are very annoying and demand adulation, even when they’re doing very little to deserve it. The reason my enthusiasm for Mani Ratnam has remained strong over the years is because I didn’t really see him as a holy cow. His movies were just another artifact from childhood. Also, I was just a little proud of the one Tam movie personality I didn’t have to defend to my northie friends. Not to forget the feeling of infinite superiority I derived from knowing that these northie friends didn’t have a clue about Mouna Ragam or Agni Natchatram – a feeling very similar to that one has for people who discovered Tolkien via Peter Jackson. You are glad they finally got on board, but Jesus, the effort it takes to convince them!
The experience of waiting for and finally watching Guru brought back a lot of memories. When we lived in Cuddalore (where I watched my first Ratnam movie – Agni Natchatram), we didn’t have 24 hour television, and it was possible to actually look forward to something. For some reason, I didn’t watch this movie with my parents. I watched it with a couple of friends, and a random adult who’d come along to baby-sit. I remember desperately wishing during the movie that it wouldn’t end, and I remember emerging from the theater in a daze.
One of the friends who watched the movie with me managed to get her parents permission to buy the audio cassette, and we listened to the songs for hours. We even tried to write down the words – I was in charge of the cassette player and T wrote down the words, as she was the one who knew to write in Tamil.
Perhaps thanks to being away from India, the weeks running up to Guru were, for me, quite like the weeks running up to, oh, Nayakan or Anjali. I knew it was coming, had a very vague idea of what it was going be about and who was in it, but nothing more. What’s more, I didn’t have to wait for my opening-weekend-averse parents to take me to the movie. I’m not going to review the movie here, other than to say it is an OK movie and no where in the vicinity of Nayakan, which it tries to invoke.
When I turned on Namaste America the next day (a Saturday morning ritual, if I manage to get up early enough), I found out that Mani Ratnam and other stars from the movie had been in Manhattan to promote the movie. They were all asked extremely silly questions by the desi press, to which they managed to give boring and occasionally charming answers.
That press conference, with its multitude of gushing desis was the first inkling. Since then, at almost every desi DVD store I’ve been to (and I went to several while on a mission to buy DVDs for a friend who’s recently moved out of NY), I’ve had people incessantly gush about Guru. Much of it has to do with the movie’s pedigree. I’ve finally reached the deeply saddening conclusion that Mani Ratnam is now very much a holy cow, if not one of the holiest.
It’s a good thing I didn’t come to this conclusion before watching the movie. While I was watching Guru, my only wish was for it to be not a lousy movie (and I mostly got my wish, until the very last bit, of course.) But since then, every time I read one more hyperbole about how fantastic Abhishek’s acting is or how brilliant a director Mani Ratnam is, I just want to grab the person and shake them for a minute or two. Have people become so inured to exceedingly lousy movies that a mediocre one appears superlative by default? Or is all this gushing the dues we owe a holy cow? If it’s the latter, it’s a pity, for it confirms his bovine status. And it makes it almost certain that he, too, will turn into a monstrosity, like the Big B has.




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