Vazhakku Enn 18/9

Not a review - Some random thoughts.

 Vazhakku En 18/9 (VE) ends with an epic climax - Jothi splashing caustic acid on a police inspector's face in the court premises. The scene symbolizes, in addition to many other connotations, the well-channelized angst of a commoner towards the system (law & order and the judiciary). This is quite characteristic of the late 70s and 80s Indian middle cinema of say - Mrinal Sen, Govind Nihalani or Shyam Benegal, wherein the common man questioning the system had frequently been the central theme. One such instance stand out for me - almost forty years back, Shyam Benegal's Ankur (1974) ended with a scene that is marked as the beginning of Indian parallel cinema. It had a young boy pelting a stone at a glass window and running away as the sound of the shattered glass resonates in air. It was remarked as the first stone of resistance against the casteistic and feudalistic setup of the neo-socialist India (of the 60s). VE definitely makes a more harsh statement - with acid.

VE vividly reminds us of the ground reality about the "existence" of two Indias - of the have's and the have-not's, the privileged and the underprivileged, the rich and the poor. The political and social institutions of the country have always been the center of conflict between the classes. VE features two love stories, both of them confluence at some point in the judicial system.

My last point would be on the so called disintegration of the "existent" ethical/moral fabric. It is very easy to point fingers or to moral-police, being critical of the technology or the next school going generation but that would be a terrible shortsightedness. To be brutally honest, for somebody who completed schooling just seven years back, I was shell-shocked to see that school going boys use mobile phones and film their girl classmates. I tend to think that there has been this disconnect between education and character building, somewhere in our schooling system. While our system will keep churning out engineers and mathematicians, the sociological aspects of our education badly needs some repair.