Racial Bias

Today as we were walking down the street, I saw a dark-skinned man and started to wonder aloud about his race. My friend, who heard me, asked why it was that it mattered. My reply was just that I was curious, but there’s so much more to it. I wondered because I was wanted to know whether he was Indian or whether he was a man of African descent. I wondered, because my whole life I have been told to be wary of the black man- by the news, by the books I read, by the media I consume. It’s so ingrained in my mind, that I didn’t even realize it was a thing I did. Whenever I see a black man, I automatically get more cautious. And it’s not just something I do around black people. I see a white man in a pick-up truck and I worry that he’ll be another racist who might scream at me for being a brown person and tell me to go back to my country. I see a man who looks Muslim, and thanks to the news, I am wary of them (which is ironic given that I grew up in a Muslim majority country where everyone I knew was nothing but loving and peaceful!)

What I don’t realize is that I am racist in doing this. Every day I fear that my brother or my boyfriend or my father might be mistaken as a threat to the existence of someone else and might get hurt because of it. This fear came from one attack that happened on Indian man, which ended up in the loss of an innocent life and the pain of another. An entire community felt that fear and pain, just because they were mistaken for another.

We think “Oh, we’re not race X, we can’t be hurt”, but the truth is that everyone gets hurt by the hatred we develop due to these racial biases. We created these divides to conquer, but in today’s world, do we really need to conquer? We are humans. We explore things together, we are one species. Yet we compete. We start competing when we are children, we are told that it’s a survival of the fittest. The meaning of fittest has changed, but the competition has not. Wars have been started due to differences in the color of skin, communities have been enslaved, mistreated and even killed due to these petty things.

Maybe it is time we see that everything we are isn’t just the color of our skin, the words made by our tongue or even the gods we pray to. It’s time we realize that maybe, just maybe, we are all the same inside. Love is what we need in today’s world. Not hate! Love that can show everyone that we are the same, despite our differences. That, it is our differences that should unite us, encourage us to learn about each other. It shouldn’t be about dominating the other! That is messed up.

The change starts from me. From you. From us. I am going to make an active effort to stop doing what I’ve been programmed to do. I am a cautious person, and that might not change, but I probably will try to make myself see things from another’s view. I know that I am but a speck of dirt in this massive universe, but even the smallest electron can make something positive or negative. *Cue Carl Sagan’s Pale blue dot.* 

Kaatru Veliyidai: a story of domestic abuse

When the trailer for Kaatru Veliyidai released, I was so excited. Another beautiful looking movie from Mani Ratnam with music by A.R. Rahman. The perfect combination of talents.  The music came first and it was soul touching and so amazingly melodious; so typical of A.R.R's magic. I watched the promotions, music videos and got more excited.

I couldn't watch the movie in the theaters and I was very sad. So imagine my joy when I finally got a chance to watch the movie. I sat in anticipation to watch this beautiful looking movie and the first few shots were so amazing.

** Spoilers ahead** 

Sadly, as the movie went on, I was thoroughly disappointed. I initially thought it was just VC's arrogance which made me dislike his character. He tells his first girlfriend that he would marry her only after the first child and soon after he rats her out to her dad and gets her sent of to Pune just so that he can pursue Leela, a doctor who's just moved to town.  Soon his misogynistic ways started showing up. It started with a brush off of Leela by telling her that women and men are not equal and that women must be beautiful to join the Air Force. Slowly with every progressing scene, VC humiliates, belittles, and even physically abuses Leela. Each time, he returns with a "Sorry" and "I love you". Leela's friend and admirer once asks her colleague why Leela puts up with him abusing her, to which she says, "it's love". I call bullshit! Love is NOT abuse and belittling. There is a scene in the movie, where he almost gets it. VC admits that his father was abusive to his mother and that he didn't want to be a horrible husband, but funnily enough, in a scene where his pregnant sister in law has gone into labor and his father in the waiting room starts screaming, VC begins yelling at everyone and even snaps at Leela, belittling her in front of his entire family.

Now, Leela, who is a well educated doctor practicing in Kashmir, is simply smitten by VC. She does, to her credit, realize that she is being mistreated. In the beginning, she refuses to leave before a snow storm and when VC tells her that he would slap her and drag her off the mountain when she shows courage and sense by telling him to explain to her why he wants her to do something, rather than threatening her. He seems to understand temporarily, but forgets soon enough. Throughout the movie, you can see her struggle as she realizes she's being abused. She leaves several times, and each time she comes back to VC after he pleads with her for forgiveness. One time she even asks "Why do I keep coming back to you?". Just before the film's climax, she meets VC and tells him that she's leaving Srinagar and him and he yells back that he'll come searching for her (WTF?!) . Leela realizes that he's not good for her. Despite this, at the end of the movie, she welcomes him back with open arms with his child in tow- a child, he BTW wanted her to get rid of when she told him that she was pregnant.

This movie was just filled with WTF moments. Mani Ratnam can not possibly imagine that such a relationship is normal. What's worse, he romanticizes it. He makes it seem that a guy can be as abusive he wants to and he'll still get the girl at the end. The scenes I've mentioned are just the tip of the iceberg. There are false promises of marriage, insulting of Leela's parents at, get this, her grandfather's funeral! Scenes that just make you squirm and wonder where the writer who wrote OK Kanmani is!

The movie has its share of great visuals and music, but the fact that the story and the characters were so terribly developed just made me absolutely hate it. It was nice to see a marriage where the bride was almost 8 months pregnant and talk of sex before marriage, but the abuse just stole the spotlight. I wish the movie had been different, that there could've been a redeeming factor, but there was nothing and it just left me feeling miserable that Mani Ratnam, a man whose movies are so popular, could possibly want to normalize an abusive relationship.