This is for you, dear Door-knobs

A still from Aashiq Abu’s Naaradan, starring Tovino Thomas

There are four certainties in life - death, taxes, journalism (why will we ever stop consuming daily facts about the world), and quarters after quarters of Old Monk at the Press Club, for people struggling to bring home those stories.

Aashiq Abu's Naaradan (2022) surveys the latter two worlds in the Malayalam film - the future of the both of which don't look so certain, after all.
Now, I haven't come across too many Indian films that are about news media per se (as against stories they report on). Quite like, say, the mini-series, The Loudest Voice (2019), on the Fox News nut Roger Ailes (Russell Crowe). Or, quite unlike Ram Gopal Varma's Rann (2010), which was a wasted opportunity.

To introduce Abu as a director, he made Virus (2019), on the 2018 Nipah outbreak in Kerala, like a suspense-thriller. Only a year before the globe was under the grip of a similar virus - making the film among the most urgent documents of the times. As is Naaradan, dealing with a virus of another kind.

And you wouldn't think so into the movie's first half-hour - examining passage of time, through people using non-smart phones, and Press Club blokes going about their day/night job, cribbing about salaries being skipped (because employers can't pay). A competition of sorts between online news, that still does a better job with stories, over ‘legacy' media, that has clout and resources to do much better.

Stuck in this situation is a mild-mannered, conscientious star-anchor, one Chandraprakash. Up until this point, if you ask me, the film's aesthetics are quite pedestrian. That's both a worry, and a surprise. The actor playing Chandraprakash is Tovino Thomas.

I needn't introduce Thomas if you've seen Minnal Murali (2021) on Netflix - indisputably India's best superhero film, with potential for a global franchise. Thomas is Minnal Murali. And like a Malayali superhero, he goes through a transformation in Naaradan as well - although in the morally reverse direction, if you may.

His character is sidestepped by his news channel employers - because a newsier journalist, with boots on the ground, is a better hire, and deserves greater screen-time. Shit happens, yo. Ego is a prickly thing; it could presumably define every move you make, only because a sensitive, little balloon called self-worth/esteem has been hurt.

For a second, think of the rival journalist, with a wider field experience, and head to the ground, as Rajdeep Sardesai, in a channel still dedicated to news gathering as, say, NDTV. The fresh portrait of Thomas as the snubbed Chandraprakash that emerges thereafter - of a bully in a corporate suit, backed by money, allowing him to mindlessly blabber and shame Indians, without any consequences - is, decidedly, Arnab Goswami.

Obviously Goswami himself, in general, wouldn't matter, if he didn't inspire enough mini-me/me-too Door-knobs, similarly taking news out of television, replacing it with bizarre principles, that Chandraprakash lays down for employees, demanding "energy and loyalty" from them - for his own channel now, that totally looks like Republic TV! It's called Naaradan, positioned as the "pracharak" (publicist/propagandist).

His commands being, "Emotions > facts. Allegations first, explanations later… I want dirt; the lotus of success will bloom in that dirt!" A feature film on Goswami alone is hardly furthering a cult then. All of this would even seem too filmy for a film - only that it doesn't even capture the whole truth of cheap, reality TV, masquerading as open propaganda.

How does one explain such naked transformations, though? I ask this equally for actual people engaging in such a pyre for a profession. Money, as greed is God - cornering Kerala's Rs 700-crore news television market, for instance - is too simplistic.

Everybody has a living to make and rent to pay. Abu, I reckon, borrows a trope from another Malayalam movie, Fahadh Faasil starrer Trance (2020), about a man being groomed into a ‘god-man'. Thomas as Chandraprakash similarly psyches himself towards a sociopathic, unscrupulous self-belief, and a devious worldview, that allows for no other.

The content that follows - similar to what passes for ratings-led, Indian TV news - is what lay, sane, English audiences, I'm convinced, only watch as funny bloopers and verbally diarrheic, viral clips on social media now. To upturn the Gandhian quote: "First you win, then they laugh at you, fight you, and then ignore you." Unless this is merely my wish masked as stats.

Enough people, for lack of an option during the pandemic, religiously watched Indian TV news in 2020, to learn how utter lies get peddled, and that truth is elsewhere. Apologies aren't part of these anchors' vocabulary. The Sushant Singh Rajput case was a turning point. Most people I meet genuinely wanna know where they should get their facts from. The plot around Chandraprakash in the film is based on widely reported, personal facts too; sufficiently fictionalised, of course.

An answer to cheap theatrics as mainstream, national news is a movie on it, I guess - that, in turn, is infinitely more engaging/entertaining, anyway! Only that I watched Naaradan at its "world premiere" with hardly a few people in Mumbai.

Which makes me recommend it all the more, in case you find a suitable show-timing at a theatre near you, or on an OTT platform at some point. Or better still, for Abu to scale the film further, for a Hindi/English language remake. Or, somebody, pick up the rights!

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14

Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com

The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper