Kumbalangi musings

Kumbalangi Nights, where the days are never boring. There is always some action, good or bad.

A family of brothers not on good terms mostly, two of them lazy, one a mute, and the fourth a school student - Kumbalangi Nights is their story.

Along the way you get glimpses of Kerala’s societal issues like moral policing and voluntary unemployment (a word coined by Bibek Debroy), alcoholism, suicides.

It’s a simple story, a simple script, a simple movie.

All the actors do their bit very well, the newcomers included.

To Fahadh Faasil’s credit, he is still not caught in the trappings of superstardom. He is willing to share screen space, even cede space to, capable actors like Shane Nigam, who could well be a superstar in the making, and Soubin Shahir.

Anna Ben as Babymol is cute. The ease with which she plays down an inter-religion marriage saying, “so what, Christ is no stranger to us”, was kola mass.

Kumbalangi Nights ticks all the boxes. It might even appeal to an overseas audience. But that is it. It is a good movie - good but not great.

We expect a lot more from the Dileesh Pothan stable. May I say ‘yeh dil maange more.’ 

President Kovind is busy, please do not disturb

A few filmmakers are terribly upset the President of India didn’t personally hand over the national awards they won. They just boycotted the event. A few others attended the event and accepted the awards from the I&B minister. The event is over, but now everyone is fighting over why the few pricey, arrogant, pain-in-the-ass variety filmmakers skipped the function.

Now these filmmakers may have felt insulted or disappointed. They have their reasons for that. But President Ram Nath Kovind has his reasons for scaling down his presence too.

Nobody is speaking for the President, so I have decided to take up that onerous task.

Kovind is the President of India, the world’s largest democracy. He is the commander in chief of the world’s fourth largest army. In the pantheon of world leaders he is right there along with Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, etc. What I mean to say is, he is a busy man.

So busy he has so far not been able to explore the Rs 16,000 crore palace he lives in. At 2 lakh square feet, his house is several times larger than the Lulu Mall many of you silly Mallus go to on weekends and during vacations. There are 340 rooms there, most of the times he gets lost I guess, it is humanly not possible to know exactly where these 340 rooms are. The bigger trouble is he has over 750 employees, there have been presidents who completed their terms without getting to know the names of even 10 of them. 

This is in addition to a 13 acre garden, swimming pool, golf course, football field, tennis courts and other random stuff that needs to be taken care of. Yes, there are many caretakers there, but there are so many of them, they too need some care-taking.

That is not all. Every now and then a file lands up from the Union govt or the 29 state govts or the 7 centrally administered territories. They need to be signed, most of the times he doesn’t even have to read them. On some occasions he needs to seek the advice of the home ministry, which tells him what to do. The trouble is when he gets files he needs to sit on. There are quite a few of them, they are kept in another room. Sometimes the files stay there for such a long time, the staff forgets where they kept it, and a search is needed.

The President also has to host dinner and lunch for visiting dignitaries. Preparations for these begin months in advance. What cutlery to use for example. If you need to snub someone, serve them food in stainless steel plates. Or serve just dhoklas and masala dosas to a guest who relishes non-vegetarian food. This is how diplomatic messages are put across. A lot of thought goes into all of this.

Now you might ask how past presidents found time to hand over awards. They were too old to do any of this work.

The current president we have is putting a value to time. No waste of unnecessary time. Conferring one award would take one minute, so 137 of them would mean more than 2 hours. Now tell me friends how does he find time for this after all the work he has to do. 

Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum: An eyewitness account

Imagine it’s a lazy May afternoon. You are in the sitout, reading a short story, watching time pass at its own pace. Minute by minute, second by second. No fast edits, no camera jerks. You just sit there and read the story. That is Dileesh Pothan’s Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum.

Pothan, unlike other big names in the industry, is a simple story teller. He might use different techniques in doing so, but they are done smartly and never stand out like a blaring horn on a highway.

Suraj Venjaramoodu gets a good role, zero buffoonery, 100% substance. He gets such roles once in a blue moon, but does justice to it. It’s his onscreen wife who steals the show. Nimisha Sajayan (Sreeja), I googled her name and without mentioning her this review would be incomplete, shines in should I call an understated role. No antics, totally real and smart. When her affair with a lower caste man (Suraj) is discovered at home she promptly says ‘ഒരു ദുർബല നിമിഷത്തിൽ ഞങ്ങൾ ശാരീരിക ബന്ധത്തിലേർപ്പെട്ടു (In a weak moment we had sex)’, a dialogue we often hear in TV soaps and painkili magazines (Malayalam’s Manohar Kahaniyaan).

The star, however, is Fahadh Faasil, who plays a thief who gets caught stealing the gold necklace of Sreeja.  Here on begins the thief’s struggle to get out of the situation he is in. He tries all the tricks, പതിനെട്ട് അടവും so to say, and fails at every stage.

But with every passing second the thief gains the sympathy of the audience, and I suspect his victims, with his charming wit. He is a motivational guru, never giving up hope, even when pushed to the wall. “Try till the very end, that is my ഇത്,” he would say. And the audience, by now eating out of his hand, lapping up every lie he has to say, too doesn’t give up hope till the end.