Self Expression Magazine

Deiva Thirumagal: ‘I Am Krishna’, Or So They Say !

By Aravindan Ingersol @iaravindan

Deiva Thirumagal: ‘I am Krishna’, or so they say !

'I am Krishna'


  • When you decide to base your entire movie on an English prototype, why not show some grace, and honor your source of inspiration with few seconds of screen space? Is it because of the deliberate urge, by the director, to pass off the movie to an overwhelming majority of people as a product of his cerebral torment? Or is it the larger Tamil or Indian culture to claim credit, wittingly or unwittingly, for what is not yours?
  • I marvel at the freedom that directors take when they decide to script socially incompetent characters, stretching their limits of moral superiority - looking down at such characters (and the larger cohort they represent) as nothing more than objects of comic relief. Very much like the amusement derived out of watching animals in a zoo. A grown up, with a capability of a five year old, can be made to act out, very reasonably, like a five year old. But showing the protagonist in the opening shot lying on the floor, squirming, with the most awkward leg twist (a pose hard to enact for any sane person or so our subconscious has been trained or told to believe) should make any well meaning person climb the effing wall. And what’s with that incessant clapping every now and then! Five year old's do that, seriously?
  • It’s quite obvious that when the makers set out to create this movie, they wanted to make an all out emotionally manipulative work. Why then distract the plot by charting austere, diabolically cunning villains working on a conspiracy to defeat the good, when you can simply weave a kitschy drama with just the goody normal characters? Google 'Karan Johar' for further details.
  • Another reservation about the movie- a fact which the director has quite comfortably chosen to overlook in his quest for manipulative glory- is his unwillingness to put on screen, objectively, as to why the protagonist should or should not be deemed fit to parent his daughter. If the protagonist really is or isn’t capable of fathering the child, is for us (viewers) to decide for ourselves. The director may be thought, based on his whims, he could hold our hands firm and trudge the road of reason and pragmatism. Only that he was so subsumed in enacting a cop-chasing thief like action drama around the court, in the latter half, that he forgot to reason out, to the protagonists and to the court of law, the intricacies of the future of a complex father-daughter relationship.
  • Were those supposedly adult jokes played on the protagonist really funny that they had to be used over and over again? And the “intha kaalathu ponunga elam apdithan. Yaaru ariva paakuraanga”-(brides these days are such that they don’t care about brains) - remark was misogynistic and in very cheap taste. 
  • If you are trying to wax poetic on screen, why not prolong the shot to let the moment to sink in rather than indulge in a mad rush to move on to the next frame. Case in point is the scene where the protagonist and his friends walk down a chequered road, holding balloons up in the air, waving chaotically in a gentle breeze.
  • Whatever the parallel they were suggesting between YG Mahendran-Anushka and Vikram-Nila, I just didn’t get the drift. What did I miss, anyone? Or, was there not any drift to miss in the first place ?
  • A wealthy woman, with an extremely understanding father, chooses of all people a mentally challenged person to marry and procreate and the director thinks that is an episode not worth exploring. For people who have sat through internal assessments in colleges, copying verbatim from the god (at least for the duration of that test) behind them, this error of omission should be quite understandable. “Don’t ask, don’t talk, just copy” is the rule of the game there and with minor modifications, that rule can be retrofitted perfectly in the context of this movie, to make sense of this blatant error of omission. I wish not to expound further; the lesser said the better here.
  • The protagonist offers money to the shop keeper for the shoe he’s bought for his daughter and finds himself short of cash and the shopkeeper-“aathifying tea in an empty shop”- is terribly pissed off and spouts abuses at a group of people mentally incapable of doing even simple math. Very plausible counter-reaction from the shopkeeper, innit? But not certainly in a planet I live in.  
  •  'I am Krishna' ? Afraid not. 'I am doofus' ? Most certainly.


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