OF KINGS AND COMMONERS, OF CINEMA AND RELATABILITY

Anything and everything comes down to only two words – ‘success’ or ‘failure’. Movies are not any exception for this criteria. But how do we define a movie’s success? Is it the money it accumulates - Dangal and PK raked in huge chunks of cash? Is it the returns in terms of the ratio of the money invested to the money gained - Soodhu Kavvum and Naduvula Konjam Pakkaththa Kaanom amassed more than 500% of the investment? Now consider the fact that these were movies made with INR 1 to 2 crores, and the percentage seems meaningless because the monetary returns are David when compared to the loot a Goliath like PK could muster. Does it mean NKPK is not a success and PK is?

The answer to this criteria is something called ‘relatability’. Anything that could draw a parallel with the audience’s mindset becomes success. This is where Baahubali – unlike the usual Indian movies with unplanned and all-over-the-place sequels – succeeds emphatically.

Forget the technicality of the movie, it is the concept and storyline in itself that draws in attraction. It is our story, a story that has been passed on from generation to generation as word of mouth; our grandmothers and grandfathers told our fathers and mothers, they tell us and we might pass it on. These are rags to riches stories, these are good-conquering-evil stories; these are stories where ­­dharma prevails and truth triumphs. Most importantly, these are stories of a boy-next-door – one amongst us – emerging victorious.

Psychologically, our want of historically rooted movies could be judged in line with our innate nature of reflecting in our own past, and in some cases, a vision for the future. We are ingrained with the thought that our nation was fabulous in the past, and would be flamboyant in the future. More than the present, it is the other tenses we care more about. And Baahubali effectively ticks this box.

When it comes to the economic demography of India, we are mostly populated with middle class and impoverished people who always dream about getting a better living rather than a better life. We drool at rich restaurants, we admire the posh bungalows, our jaws drop at the sight of a limo. Though we are confronted with the reality that not everyone can be as rich as a few people, that pleasure of pride, wealth and power always incites us to a greater extent. We imagine ourselves – or someone like us, ‘like’ meaning ‘in a similar financial echelon’ - as a center of undeterred power, and go on to create an atmosphere of our own. Our world has castles, greenery, peace, joy; it is heavenly. This gap between reality and a fictional world playing within our mind is exactly expressed in the visuals of Baahubali.

The basic idea of vengeance-submission-uproar-emergence-victory is something we face on a daily basis, although I would not vouch for the vengeance part as much as I do for the other parts of the sequence. We go to a hospital, they understand the patient needs immediate treatment; so they use it as a means to milk money from us. We go to a Government office, they comprehend we are working class, and cannot afford to come again and again, so they ask for money to get things done. We resort to submission, we pay money. The post-submission parts of the above-mentioned sequence never happen in our lives. Why do Shankar’s films always cater effectively? Because it is the want of everyone – or, at least most of us – to raise a voice against this inequality-trodden society, where economic classes vary distinctly based on several factors. We must be laughing at the scene when in Anniyan, Vikram overpowers a hundred odd trained martial arts fighters who pound on him, in that otherwise brilliantly staged stunt choreography, but we get goosebumps. Why? Because we might be that character, except the fact that our barrier stops us after the mental thought of standing against power centers creeps in. We never take that plunge of actually doing anything. The whole picture is only in our mind. This vicariousness is what makes movies stand out. We want bad guys to be thrown away, we want evil to be destroyed, eradicated. Period. We might wince at the sight of the injection of a syringe into a patient’s hand in reality, but we do not oppose the villain being thrown in a burning pyre or the antagonist being tortured with Garuda Purana punishments.

(Mild Spoiler Alert) A part of me wanted to LOL after the scene where the soldiers of Magizhmadhi (which transliterates to Beautiful Moon or Happy/Beautiful Mind, the latter explaining as a metaphor the whole mind game between the makers of the movie and the audience – the vicariousness, to be precise) use palm trees as catapults, with themselves as stones, in order to get into the fort of the king. But a part of me also muttered, “Please let these people win, Almighty; they are fighting for a cause. These people are GOOD.”

We might have smirked had the technical crew of Baahubali been amateur, but we might have still loved it – maybe not to this extent – because this is the Ambulimama story we have read, because these are the kinds of stories that make us remember the pen name Vandumama more than the real name Kowsikan, because these are stories based on our land and our people, because we are who we are.