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September 1, 2025

The Atlas of Ghee and Gridlock

thiruvannamalai gopuram

Optional, but for those who like their comedies with a prologue, please see Part 1: A Summer of Good Intentions and Bad Attention.

It began, as all midlife revelations do in the year 2025, with a YouTube thumbnail: a woman in Santorini holding The Bell Jar like a wine glass, promising that travel had healed her reading life. The Good Reader clicked. And clicked again. And an hour later, algorithmically enlightened and fully caffeinated, he arrived at a conclusion so bold, so unearned, so obviously doomed that it could only be his: the problem was place. Not him. Never him. His unread summer was not a failure of will, attention, he told himself. It was environmental. He had been trying to read in the same stale corners where he paid bills, ignored text messages, and watched seventeen-minute videos on decluttering without decluttering. But what if he moved? What if, like the travel gods and booking apps and shimmering people of Instagram had foretold, a change in scenery could change everything?

And so, delirious with purpose, he packed his bags, not with socks or chargers, but with intentions. He would read where the air smelled different. He would annotate in cafes with wooden tables and unobtrusive jazz. He would become the kind of man who reads under foreign skies. Never mind that Austen never left Hampshire, Dickens barely crossed the Channel, and Tolstoy, that snowy colossus, wrote War and Peace without once visiting a curated riad in Marrakesh. The Good Reader was not interested in historical precedent. He was interested in possibility. In curated stillness. In Airbnb silence. In the slow-motion footage of himself turning a page while a tram passed behind him in Lisbon.

And so he departed, hopeful, unread, and chronically online, to chase literature across oceans. His first stop: Chennai.

So the Good Reader’s summer pilgrimage began in Chennai, that humid furnace of temples, traffic, and family obligations, where he arrived on a British Airways flight carrying not only luggage but also a dozen hardcovers. As he stumbled out of immigration, two taxi drivers instantly materialized, each shouting competing truths: one quoted 1,400 rupees, the other 700, about $17 versus $8, both assuring him with priestly conviction that their fare alone contained salvation. There was a philosophical question in it. Was the Good Reader worth double? Or was he, as he feared, the kind of man who would always choose the cheaper cab and therefore the cheaper fate? Before he could answer, the crowd surged, horns blared, and Chennai wrapped him in its dense, sweaty embrace.

The very first thing he read in India was Kanni Theevu, the serialized comic strip that has been running for sixty-three years in the Dina Thanthi newspaper. Episode #23,193. Yes, twenty-three thousand one hundred and ninety-three. That’s more than Proust, Balzac, and Dickens combined. This morning’s installment featured Sindbad, the once-classic adventurer, now inexplicably conscripted into something resembling a Rajamouli battle scene, flying about on golden birds with arrows sticking out of their feathers. It was magnificent nonsense, and the Good Reader thought: If this is literature in Chennai, I can stop worrying. The city is already reading for me.

It was the month of Aadi, when the goddesses descend from their sanctums and erupt onto the roads in twelve-foot banners, neon-outlined and serial-lit like cosmic billboards. Lakshmi gleamed beside traffic lights, Mariamman beamed over pharmacies, and Durga’s lion snarled above autorickshaws. Twice, in peak evening traffic, his car was engulfed by ritual throngs; and both times, in an act of supreme kindness, the crowd parted, waving him forward. The result was an accidental drive-thru darshan. For a surreal instant he found himself peering straight through the temple doors at the deity herself, chauffeured to revelation without leaving the back seat.

Day One was meant for buying local books. He would buy Indian magazines and dailies to read in India. He returned with India Today, The Hindu, a yellowing Ananda Vikatan, and, because the kiosk man smirked, Vogue India. He stacked them reverently, and prepared to read. But first, a mini tiffin for breakfast. And the pongal, golden, molten, ghee-laden, destroyed him. He collapsed into a seven-hour carb coma. When he woke, three aunties, two uncles, and a cousin he hadn’t seen since 1999 had materialized with more food. Reading was postponed, indefinitely, to the afterlife.

And yet, amid the assaults of ghee, he always found salvation in filter coffee. The slow drip of decoction, brewed like a lab experiment and frothed into steel tumblers, became his truest text. Each cup promised twenty pages of progress; instead, it delivered twenty minutes of jittery pacing and long essays to himself about what he would read later. Still, he drank cup after cup, a pilgrim in the Church of Decoction.

The days blurred: temples, traffic, relatives, food. Chennai was a city under permanent renovation, each street dug up, each corner sprouting a Metro Train pillar, as if the city were sacrificing the present so some future generation could glide smoothly forty years hence. Every cab ride was meant to be his silent reading hour, but instead became a rolling seminar: Vijay’s political entry, the price of tomatoes, whether cricket collapses were fate or foolishness. He nodded gravely, muttered “Ah, correct, correct,” and held his book like a tragicomic prop.

Once, he managed a walk. From Bazullah Road to G.N. Chetty Road, past Vani Mahal, he crossed Sangeetha and Geetham, two restaurants that had split like quarreling siblings, now competing with identical menus. At Sangeetha he ordered coffee; at Geetham, tea. Both tasted excellent, both arrived boiling, both sugared beyond mercy. The difference was academic: one was called tea, the other coffee. That walk, probably the longest he managed in Chennai, grounded him. Elsewhere, walking was impossible. KK Nagar was a chaos of potholes, encroached pavements, snarling traffic, and an absurd street-war over stray dogs. People shouted, groups split, alliances shifted. Our Good Reader, wisely, stayed neutral, knowing either side might bite.

He sought books again. The Tamil bookshop offered him little, yet staring at the rows of unfamiliar names he chastised himself. He stared at the Tamil titles, feeling the weight of his own ambition. Was he chasing literature, or just running from himself? He must change his attitude, return to Tamil contemporary writing, discover something beyond Sujatha’s science fiction and Ashokamitran’s humble novels. Driving past their houses, he remembered them with reverence, along with Cho’s satire and Jayakanthan’s radical prose.

On a drive to Kanchipuram, the so-called city of a thousand temples, he found that nearly all of them were undergoing renovation. Every gopuram was covered in scaffolding, slathered in a coat of ritual yellow fabric. Shiva, Vishnu, all seemed to have conspired to hold a citywide consecration clearance sale. The gods were still eternal, but their towers looked like construction projects from an overambitious municipal plan.

He tried English bookstores in malls. He tried. But the shelves carried The Da Vinci Code, Fifty Shades, GRE prep guides from 2011. It looked like US Airport bookstores in exile, only dustier.

He sighed, bought yet another tote bag, and carried it to Kapaleeshwarar Temple, convinced that perhaps the gods would grant him a chapter if he only read in their presence. He settled cross-legged in a corner with his book, tote bag beside him like a loyal but useless squire. Almost immediately the temple loudspeakers roared to life. A man with a voice like gravel mixed with nasal syrup launched into a public sermon: simple life truths from the Thevaram, twisted into parables about grocery bills, cricket collapses, and unruly children. Every few sentences he broke into song, a thin, nasal chant of Thevaram verses that the microphone faithfully mangled and then blared for three kilometers in every direction. Each note ricocheted across the gopuram and into the Good Reader’s skull. Reading Julian Barnes was hard enough in silence; under the assault of devotional karaoke, it was impossible.

He shifted, hunting for quiet, and found a side space near the small shrine of Lord Shaniswara, where the sound was fractionally less punishing. There he discovered two temple cats playing tag among the pillars, their chase far more gripping than any plot in his unopened book. He noticed the devotees too: everyone walked in strict single file on a cemented path coated with some mysterious cooling compound, as if the temple floor had become a game board where stepping outside the squares meant instant disqualification. Curious, he sat down to observe, but within three seconds the stored heat of the ancient stone rushed straight through his dhoti and into his spine. He sprang up like a man electrocuted, though he later told himself it was all deliberate.

The real reason for his sudden leap was more persuasive: beneath the gopuram, volunteers were distributing hot puliyodharai in little cups made from pressed dry leaves. The smell alone collapsed his literary ambitions. He abandoned the shrine, the cats, the tote bagged books, and joined the throng, shoveling down the tangy tamarind rice with manic devotion. Once was not enough. He returned for a second serving, standing barefoot among strangers, cheeks bulging with holy carbs, taste buds singing Yaar Yaar Sivam, off-key but bliss-drunk. The book, once again, never left the bag.

Even Wi-Fi mocked him. In his bedroom, the signal wheezed like a dying harmonium. To catch a bar, he shuffled into the living room, where serials blared at max volume. He abandoned books and began reading people instead: their gossip, their WhatsApp forwards, their endless speculation about weddings. Chennai gave him not novels but serialized oral epics, complete with cliffhangers and filter coffee breaks.

Modernity added its own comedy. Swiggy, Zomato, Blinkit, Instamart delivered at such speed he suspected even literature might arrive boxed in ten minutes. It never did. Instead, always rava dosa. He ate, grateful, and stayed unread.

For variety, he tried five-star buffets. Two hotels in a week. Here he discovered India’s paradox of luxury: naans transcendent, curries mediocre, prices astronomical. Hospitality itself was the entree; waiters refilled plates like emergency responders, insisted he try aloo gobi gratin with tragic devotion, and treated him like a visiting emperor while serving dal that tasted suspiciously like dull rainy day in Seattle.

Doctor visits, too, became their own literature. His mother’s checkups resembled travel interviews: twenty minutes on Seattle’s rainy weather, five minutes on her blood pressure. Prescriptions came only from the in-house pharmacy, a plot twist nobody resisted.

And then there was first-day-first-show Rajinikanth movie. The cinema theater was temple and stadium combined: camphor, confetti, applause that bent walls. His book became a popcorn coaster, his glasses fogged from ecstasy. Reading had no chance against Rajini.

At Thiruvannamalai, the temple wasn’t a sanctuary but an ocean. Humanity surged in tidal waves; incense smoked like fog machines; chants thundered like amplifiers. To imagine pulling out Karl Ove Knausgaard was delusion. Reading here was not resistance, it was surrender, to sweat, to rhythm, to collective devotion. And then, unexpectedly, for a few minutes he forgot about tote bags, Goodreads lists, Knausgaard, all of it. He was just another body in the tide, pressed shoulder to shoulder, palms streaked with turmeric and vibhuti ash, chanting syllables he barely recognized. He was swallowed, shaken, broken open, and yet, in that surrender, he felt something astonishingly close to what he had come chasing: attention, undivided and absolute. Not on a page, but on a god glowing behind a curtain of incense.

Still, Chennai was not cruel. It engulfed him with kindness. Strangers guided him across roads. Relatives fed him as though he were a famine orphan. Doctors leaned in, curious about Seattle clouds. Goddesses glowed at intersections. The city whispered, “Don’t read me in a book. Read me directly”. It gave him sweat, gossip, ghee, coffee, neon, scaffolding, potholes, kindness. His books remained locked in their suitcase, noble tourists never stamped. The one text he read with full attention? A restaurant bill itemizing “pongal (extra ghee)” twice.

After twelve nights, which he generously rebranded as a personal Twelfth Night, the Good Reader boarded his flight. Shakespeare had banishment and disguise; he had tote bags and unopened books. Unread but faintly adored, he moved on to the next city, still incapable of finishing page one but fully committed to the sequel.

(to be continued…)

cross-posted to LinkedIn
July 27, 2025

Stamp-Size Thinking (or How We Lost the Long Thought)

It’s late July in the Pacific Northwest, the time of year locals call ‘summer’ which means the rain has been rescheduled to a more convenient weekend. The tomatoes in my backyard are suspiciously green, the sunsets arrive just before bedtime, and the only thing you can count on is the distant perfume of woodsmoke. Fingers crossed it’s from one of my neighbor’s barbecue, not the wildfires. Around here, the sunny season is longer than usual. We might get a full five days this year, maybe even six, if the weather gods are feeling generous. But summer does something rare, it lets your mind meander. It’s the season of daydreaming. Which is, incidentally, where this story begins.

There once was an age when a thought could really make itself at home. No rush, no calendar invites, no expectation to fit itself onto a post-it. A thought back then had ambitions, it wanted to be an epic. If you asked Socrates a simple question, he’d start stroking his beard, stare into the middle distance, and promptly answer with another question, then another, then launch into a debate so long you’d finish your hummus and start thinking about ordering takeout.

Socrates, for what it’s worth, would have made a terrible panelist on a Netflix reality show. Imagine: “Love Is Blind, but for Philosophy.” He’d filibuster every elimination. He’d want a fidget spinner to keep his hands busy while he wondered whether fidget spinners even exist or if they’re just the illusion of motion in a digital age. By the time he finished, the ratings would be gone, the host would have retired, and Netflix would be recommending a documentary called Talking in Circles.

But this is the charm of long thought. The sheer right to ramble, to contradict, to pause and, perhaps, change our mind. The ancient Indians, for example, took meandering thought to Olympic levels. Buddhist councils, they say, stretched on for months. Surely, after all that time, what emerged was more than just enlightenment. And then, of course, there’s the Gita. One epic long thought delivered in 18 chapters and hundreds upon hundreds of rolling, metrical verses, all while standing in the middle of a battlefield. Now, that’s commitment to an argument.

Gandhi and Ambedkar, Nehru and Patel, these were not men who shied away from a good, meandering fight. Their disagreements and agreements during Indian Independence were not just philosophical, they were over the very bones of a new nation: caste, representation, whether the village or the city should be India’s heart. Letters, pamphlets, endless back-and-forth, all in public and none of it blocked or muted.

Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, once looked at this tradition and gave it a name: ‘The Argumentative Indian.‘ Sen did not mean it as an insult but as a badge of honor, a recognition that India, at its best, was a place where argument and disagreement were not threats to harmony but its very foundation. Spirited, public debate was the operating system, not a glitch. The arguments themselves weren’t the magic. It was all the quiet thinking that came first, the slow-cooked ideas that made even the most heated debates worth having.

Somewhere along the line, we all got busier, and busier at being busy. The world sped up, and so did our expectations of thought. Where ancient debates took months and a good argument might outlast a monsoon, today even a traffic light feels too slow. Our machines got faster, our networks noisier, and a thousand little prompts, from news feeds to streaming shows now jostle for our attention, each promising instant answers, instant outrage, instant everything. The patient luxury of letting an idea simmer, toying with uncertainty, or tolerating silence has quietly become a rare skill, almost a rebellion. In the age of rapid refresh and ‘next episode’ countdowns, there is simply no space for a thought to unpack its suitcase and stay a while.

Once, knowledge was like a cathedral, spacious, slow to build, requiring patience and time. Now it’s a food truck at a festival, loud, fast, everyone elbowing for attention, and most things gone before you figure out what’s worth trying.

Here’s the bit that should keep us up at night. Civilization-changing thoughts have always taken their time. Let’s pick a weirdly odd but a perfect example. Take blood circulation, a concept so basic now it’s hard to imagine anyone getting it wrong. For centuries, people just assumed blood sloshed about inside you, as if your body were a washing machine set to ‘random.’ Galen, clever but mistaken, convinced the world it all sort of drifted this way and that. Then came Ibn al-Nafis, quietly suggesting there might be more to it. But it took William Harvey, to labor through the evidence, face down the doubters, and prove, slowly, painstakingly, in the face of ridicule and inertia, that blood circulates. It took over a hundred years of patient friction and debate before the world caught on. Every checkup, every diagnosis, every heartbeat today depends on the outcome of that long, stubborn argument.

That’s the point. Big ideas, the kind that shift the ground beneath us, need time and space and, most of all, friction. They need the long thought.

And it turns out, jobs that really matter (teachers, doctors, parents, engineers, the guy who has to explain your health insurance policy) rely on the long thought, not the hot take. The ability to sit quietly with uncomfortable facts, to listen longer than is strictly necessary, is not only rare but the one skill that sets you apart from the chorus of stamp-sized opinions.

So where, you might wonder, does the long thought hide out these days? I’ll tell you: in the pauses. In the margin notes on a good book. In the fifteen-minute shower where you forget you already washed your hair. In the suspiciously quiet evening walk, phone left at home, where an idea can breathe (hopefully the air quality index isn’t toxic).

Oddly enough, zebras aren’t black with white stripes, or white with black stripes. They’re actually both and also neither. Which feels about right for where the long thought lives. Not at the extremes, but somewhere in the blurry, undefined middle. The best ideas rarely announce themselves in bright colors. They arrive camouflaged, half-glimpsed, sometimes mistaken for something else entirely.

Some of my own longest thoughts have ambushed me during strange rituals or family routines that made no sense at the time. For example, every summer, during mango season, my aunts and uncles insisted that mangoes could only be eaten standing up, usually out in the courtyard of the village house. Officially, it was a kind of tradition, supposedly for good luck but I suspect the real reason was more logistical. Indian mangoes are juicier, messier, almost engineered for maximal chaos. With a surplus of children and a shortage of space, the only solution was to exile us outside, mango juice running down our arms, the cats looking on in dignified horror. For those few minutes, we weren’t thinking about anything in particular just savoring the moment, sticky and sun-soaked. But that’s exactly when the interesting thoughts would appear, slipping in sideways, hiding between bites.

The best thinkers are not the ones with the fastest thumbs or the loudest podcasts. Darwin took the same walk every day, letting his mind wander as aimlessly as his sandwalk. Virginia Woolf stared out the window for hours, half-dreaming sentences. Take Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He could spend weeks on a single page, letting the story ferment, letting each thought linger until it tasted right. Hemingway, too, famously trimmed and rewrote until his sentences were as sharp and clear as the morning after a storm.

So perhaps the only way to resist stamp-size thinking is not to shout louder or post more but to wait it out. To practice the long thought. Maybe even to make a little ritual of it: brew a cup of chai, stare out the window, put on some Chopin or A R Rahman, and let your mind off-leash for a while. If your neighbor thinks you’ve lost it, just say you’re channeling your inner Ted Lasso, optimistic and a little bewildered.

And if you’ve read this far, through all the digressions, metaphors, wildfires, netflix references, and the stubborn voyage of blood, then maybe, just maybe, you’ve given the long thought the homecoming it deserves. If your thumb is itchy to scroll try resisting it for a second longer. Sometimes, the best thoughts aren’t meant to be liked or shared. They’re meant to be lived with, returned to, and on occasion, scribbled on the back of a very…. very large stamp.

crossposted to LinkedIn.
July 12, 2025

A Summer of Good Intentions and Bad Attention

Italo Calvino (pic: guardian)

The Good Reader

There are still readers, real ones, endangered and elusive as those peculiar souls who savor airline food. More intriguingly, there are still good readers, the kind who subscribe to the New York Review of Books, even when a New Yorker piece from last April lingers in their browser tabs like a literary ghost. This summer, our hero, let’s call him the Good Reader, resolved to do what he had not done in a decade: he would read. Not skim, not scroll, not glance, but read, diving into long, fat, slow books with index pages and forewords by translators who once lived in Peru. The Good Reader, age 42, a man of many tote bags and even more abandoned reading lists, was no stranger to such ambitions. In 2016, he declared a James Baldwin spring. In 2018, it was the Ali Smith autumn. The Hilary Mantel winter fell apart somewhere around page 47. And the summer he planned to finally read Proust? That turned into a Netflix rewatch of The Crown.

The year 2025 felt different, or so he told himself it had to be. The world had hit cognitive rock bottom, with attention spans shorter than Twitter’s new 18-character limit. Even the best book of the year, a 28-page novella woven from speech transcripts and DALL·E prompts, was hailed as “brilliantly demanding” by The Guardian and “possibly real” by Electric Literature. So, the Good Reader made a plan, as all noble quests begin, with logistics. For location, he dreamed of a cabin in the woods or a terrace in Lisbon but settled, as all men must, for an Airbnb guest bedroom in Cannon Beach, Oregon. His devices included a Kindle Paperwhite for night, an iPad for annotations, and a notebook for analog dignity.

His book stack, which he dubbed his ReadStack™, comprised eleven titles, including Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, which he pretended not to judge by its title; Julian Barnes’ Elizabeth Finch, which he bought after reading three glowing blurbs and one blistering Substack takedown; and the latest Booker darling narrated by a sentient climate model named Eos. He even checked Bill Gates’ annual summer reading list, just in case there was a surprisingly readable economics book with a pastel cover and a pun for a title. He posted this stack on Instagram, with filters, under #Bookstagram and #SummerOfSubstance, determined to break the curse of Good Intentions and become the Last Reader Standing.

The Thousand Tiny Defeats

It began on Day One, with the Good Reader brewing a French press, arranging his tools (Kindle to the left, hardcover to the right, notebook center, a Reynolds pen aligned like a weapon of war), and sitting with the posture of a man preparing to meet his gods. He opened the first book, an intergenerational novel about sugarcane farmers and quantum physics, read the first paragraph twice (lyrical, dense, possibly genius), and then a notification interrupted. It was nothing, just a Substack from a critic he admired, reviewing a book he hadn’t read, mentioning three others he now wanted to. He clicked, then clicked again, opening Amazon in another tab, detouring to Twitter (X), then Goodreads, then a hate-scroll, and twenty-six minutes later, he had read only 41 words. This was defeat number one. By Day Three, his defeats multiplied like tribbles: he highlighted a sentence in his Kindle but couldn’t resist asking ChatGPT, “What does this sentence mean in simple terms?”; he searched a character’s name and spent forty minutes reading about Hungarian naming conventions; the lawnmower roared just as the book got good; his boss messaged, “Quick thing when you have a sec?”; a group chat sent 47 unread messages debating whether the new Sapiens for Teens was any good; and his nephew emailed, a rare note he promised to read later, then forgot.

He tried audiobooks while walking, but nearly got hit by a delivery drone, his focus as fleeting as the steps he took. On Day Six, he read the back cover of a novel six times and wept quietly, not for the book, but for himself. He remembered Calvino’s Good Intentions, that charming 1959 essay about a man who went on holiday to read and returned with nothing but sunburn and regret. The Good Reader wasn’t just Calvino’s reader; he was the evolved, optimized, premium, late-capitalist, cloud-synced, neuro-fractured edition, Calvino 2.0. He was a man not merely undone by leisure, but obliterated by the relentless, hydra-headed swarm of content that defined his era.

The Mind: A Machine That Forgets to Sit Still

The Good Reader had not always been like this, or so he swore. There was a time he could read for hours, devouring novels thick enough to stun a burglar, sentences that began in one season and ended in another. He remembered reading The Brothers Karamazov on a train in India, with goats, a memory that had to mean something. But now, in the Summer of 2025, he couldn’t tell if his brain was a hyperactive toddler or a burnt-out server farm. Between the eighth browser tab and the ninth unread newsletter, he realized his brain was no longer a cathedral but an airport food court, with everyone yelling. The neuroscientists had names for this: attention residue, dopamine fatigue, task-switching costs. He had simpler ones: the blip, the ping, the doomscroll, the Wikipedia rabbit-hole, the TikTok about focus that lasted 29 minutes.

He was leaking cognition, and worst of all, he knew. He wasn’t dumb; he had read Birkerts, watched the first four minutes of Cal Newport on YouTube, and half-read five books about why he couldn’t read books. He was meta-aware, hyper-aware, a Borges story about a reader who knows he cannot read. His brain was a machine that once roamed fields and now twitched in cages, his thoughts arriving chopped, scattered, in TikTok-length fragments. Sometimes he thought, “I should read,” but forgot what, or why, or how. Reading, real reading, had become resistance, like baking bread in wartime, remembering your own phone number, or saying no to the algorithm. And he was losing the war.

The Pile Unread

When September comes, as it always will, it will arrive like a librarian clearing her throat, the summer slipping quietly out the back door, the light shifting just enough to make the Good Reader feel the loss. The Kindle, untouched and unbothered, will have updated itself three times while turned off, and the stack of books on the nightstand, once proud, soon quietly bitter, will grow a thin layer of dust and something deeper: a kind of existential judgment. The Good Reader will have read the forewords, the acknowledgements, the reviews of books he won’t read, a toxic Twitter thread that will swallow a debut author whole, and, on Threads, someone else’s quote from the very novel he meant to begin, which he’ll highlight, not in the book, but in a digital note titled “Must return to this. Later.” He will, in short, not have read.

Yet in the pile of the unread, there will be something that still hums: hope, shaped like a battered paperback, glowing faintly from a half-charged e-ink screen, or tucked between pages like a receipt from a summer that could still be salvaged. The Good Reader, for all his tiny, ridiculous defeats, will not stop wanting to read, and in the year 2025, that desire alone may nearly qualify as sainthood. When asked, perhaps on a quiet Sunday, over good coffee, with just the right measure of guilt, he will smile and say, “Reading? Of course. I just finished something wonderful last week,” though he will not have. “Which book? Oh, it’s on the tip of my tongue,” he will add, though it won’t be. But he means it.

He doesn’t read Tolstoy, but he reads his nephew’s email. Twice. And that, in a way, is literature.

cross-posted to LinkedIn.
May 14, 2025

Nayakan – The first masterpiece

_{This essay is part of the Pesum Padam – Mani Ratnam Retrospective Series and revisits Nayakan. Watch the retrospective tomorrow on youtube.}

My maternal grandfather, was the most righteous man I knew. He saw the world in clean lines. You were either good or you were not. Yet for all his black-and-white convictions, there was one name he spoke of with a peculiar softness. Pettikada Rajendran. A man who, according to him, ruled Georgetown in Madras with nothing but a stare and a sly smile. My grandfather was a young bookkeeper at a textile shop in Parry’s Corner when Rajendran stopped him once on the road. “I see you every day walking to work. Keep good health,” he said. Years later, during a scuffle at a bus stop, it was Rajendran who stepped in to defuse the tension. “From that day,” my grandfather said, “we’d nod to each other in the evenings.”

Rajendran was, by most accounts, a petty criminal. But he had rules. He collected from the rich shop owners who underpaid and overworked and gave to the vendors pushed off the streets. When the police came for him one night, the entire street shut down in protest. “He was not right…. but he helped.” That answer stayed with me. It made no sense at the time. But years later, when I watched Nayakan as an adult and really watched it, I began to understand.

Velu Naicker was not a fictional fantasy. He was a distillation of hundreds of Pettikada Rajendrans. Men who rose from within broken systems and didn’t wait for justice to arrive but rearranged justice to fit their corner of the world. I may not be able to agree with them. But I understand the ache behind their choices. Perhaps Nayakan was Mani Ratnam’s way of walking closer to Pettikada Rajendran not to praise him or pardon him but to ask him gently why.

What’s most fascinating about Nayakan is how quietly it traces the anatomy of a man aging under the weight of power. It’s not a film of grand arcs or thunderous acts. It is a story told through gradual erosion. Every gain in Velu Naicker’s world is mirrored by a loss in his soul. The movie moves forward not as chapters but as scars. Five of them, if you look closely. With each personal loss, his father, his foster father, his wife, his son, and finally himself, Velu’s face changes, his posture shifts, hairline recedes and voice lowers. Kamal Haasan, in a performance that can only be described as haunted restraint, ages the character not through makeup but through emotional subtraction. You watch the man vanish piece by piece from behind his eyes.

Mani doesn’t give us a traditional rise-and-fall gangster story. He gives us a series of psychological thresholds. Each one is marked by a death and a quiet reinvention. First, the boy who sees his father beaten to death. Then, the young immigrant in Dharavi, still unsure whether to follow his foster father’s smuggling trade or escape it. Then comes the defiant firebrand, confronting police brutality head-on and marrying a girl who is forced to become a sex worker with a kind smile and godliness in her breath. Later, the matured don with oiled-back hair, glasses, and a kunguma theetral on his forehead, a man who’s learned to live with violence like it’s a second language. Finally, the elder statesman of the slums, slowed by age, undone by grief, squatting down as his grandson asks him the only question that matters. “Were you good man or bad?” That question is not just for Velu. It’s for all of us who watched him nod silently through his life, convincing ourselves that what he did was necessary, that he helped, that he meant well. But in the end, even he doesn’t know. All he can do is say “I don’t know” and disappear.

One of Mani’s most distinctive choices as a filmmaker is his ability to define his characters through absence. Not in screen time, but in what they withhold from others and from us. Velu Naicker doesn’t spend the film justifying his life. He doesn’t deliver monologues about revenge, poverty, or justice. In fact, he says very little. We are invited not into his thoughts but into his silences, which grow heavier with each passing loss. It’s in these withheld emotions that Nayakan becomes most haunting. It’s a film filled with unsaid things, and that is precisely where it derives its power.

But in a film defined by restraint, there is one moment where the dam breaks. When his daughter Charu confronts him, when she slaps Selva, his loyal right hand, and demands to know why this violence continues and why her father continues to be feared, the wound that Velu has kept stitched up for decades is finally touched. Not by a gun or a rival but by his child. Mani, the filmmaker who so often builds power through suggestion, allows this one moment of naked involuntary exposition. But even this isn’t written as exposition. It erupts naturally and uncontainably. It is one of the most human scenes in all of Mani’s cinema. Velu doesn’t argue with data or stats. He pleads with pain. “Ask the policeman who killed my father to stop. Ask the man who killed your mother to stop. Then I’ll stop.” It is in every sense a heartbreakingly reasonable justification for everything unreasonable he’s done. That’s the problem.

Because the scene doesn’t just reveal Velu’s worldview, it tempts us. It wins us over, and we don’t want to be won. We want to judge him. But Mani makes it nearly impossible. His staging, Kamal’s staggering restraint-turned-implosion, the camera’s refusal to cut away, it drags us to the very place we’ve been avoiding: empathy towards Velu. Not the kind we feel good about. This is complicated and uncomfortable empathy. You understand the man and how he got here. You even, for a second, believe he had no other choice. That’s the scariest part. You forget your moral compass just long enough to see his.

Mani and Kamal

When I first watched Nayakan, I was ten. It was just another Kamal film, one of the quieter ones, the darker ones, the grown-up ones. I didn’t understand much. I liked the songs, especially Nila Adhu Vaanaththumele, which had a folk beat to it. But what I remember most isn’t Kamal, Mani, or the myth of Velu Naicker. It’s a boy, a mentally challenged boy, the son of Police Inspector Kelkar, the man Velu had killed. The boy comes to Velu, unaware, and says “Mera baba mar gaya.” There was something about that, the absence of the grief and logic, the sheer innocence of it, that broke me. Mani has always known how to write children with unsettling honesty. They don’t act like film children. They act like they wandered in from real life. In that moment, Mera baba mar gaya felt more devastating than any violence in the movie.

Of course, back then, there were things I didn’t understand. When Velu breaks down after his son’s death, crying in that contorted way, I remember people calling it overacting, the same way they accused Sivaji Ganesan, a claim my father refused to accept. I grew up to love them both, Sivaji and Kamal, and to utterly detest the word overacting. Sometimes, when emotion is too big for the body to hold, it spills out in strange, ugly, beautiful shapes. That’s what Kamal did in that scene. Later, it was my father again who pointed me toward Andhi Mazhai Megam. He’d worked in Bombay in his early years, and the song made him nostalgic in a way he didn’t often allow himself to be. He said it was beautiful, just that. He was right. It is my favorite song from the film now, not Nee Oru Kaadhal Sangeetham, though I love that too, but Andhi Mazhai Megam, with its circular camera movements, its raw rain-soaked holi colors, and that swirling dance of joy and defiance. I only found out later that it wasn’t even scored by Ilaiyaraaja himself but by someone under his guidance. Yet it carried his mood and rhythm.

Today, watching Nayakan as an adult, after reading Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, after watching Coppola’s films countless times, after enduring a dozen Indian remakes, tributes, and loose inspirations, I’m convinced that Nayakan remains the most powerful Indian adaptation of that narrative. It is not just about grounding the story in Indian soil. It is about rebuilding the story entirely in our language, in our slums, under our street lights. Mani didn’t copy the Godfather. He refitted it and re-imagined it through the lens of Varadaraja Mudaliar, through the locales of Bombay, through the emotional currency of loss and obligation. Yes, Ram Gopal Varma’s Sarkar is a compelling attempt. Others have come and gone. But Nayakan still towers above them because it doesn’t apologize for being an adaptation.

For all the brilliance in the screenplay, for all the haunting silences and mythic structure, for all of Kamal’s near-perfect performance, to me, the true hero of Nayakan is P. C. Sreeram. The look of this film, the tonal architecture of it, is unlike anything made before it or since. Watching Nayakan is like looking at a photograph by Ansel Adams, where the dodge and burn, the highlight and the hush, can’t be replicated, only revered. What Adams did to Yosemite, P.C. did to Bombay. There is no other Indian film that looks like it, and I doubt there ever will be.

“We wanted to use a technique calling ‘flashing’ to reduce the colors. I had another idea. I wanted to give the film a ‘period’ look. But ‘flashing’ would have been expensive. So while grading, I played with the analyser to keep the colour to the minimum. Since we print on different negatives, there is no consistency. For the interiors, I decided on top lights which mellow the lights but increase the contrast. What I did with the analyser was only 2 per cent. The rest was achieved by the sets, the costumes, and lighting.¹⁴
P.C Sreeram about Nayakan’s period film look in Cinema of Interupptions

Both Agni Natchathiram and Nayakan were shot nearly back-to-back, yet Nayakan carries the mood like a stormcloud. The chiaroscuro, the glow off utensils and rain-soaked concrete, the 35mm intimacy, was pure cinematography gold. There is a shot when the lens widens, in that stunning zoom-out of Velu and Neela at the Gateway of India in Nee Oru Kaadhal Sangeetham. That shot alone made me fall in love with the camera. I couldn’t stop rewinding. I didn’t even know what telephoto lenses were, but I knew magic when I saw it.

If P. C. Sreeram was peaking with light and shadow, then Ilaiyaraaja, by contrast, was only just beginning to explore the emotional terrain he would later master with Mani Ratnam. Their partnership would peak with Thalapathi, their final collaboration. But in Nayakan, something raw, unfiltered, and extraordinary was already taking shape.

This was Ilaiyaraaja’s 400th film, and you could feel it. Thenpandi Cheemayile, with its aching voice and village lament, has rightly entered the bloodstream of Tamil cinema. But for me, the true moment was the moment between Velu and Neela in the brothel room. The camera glides gently around the bed’s mosquito netting, and the POV toggles, first Neela looking at Velu, then Velu at Neela. The music enters like a whisper circling each other just as these two broken people begin to recognize something fragile between them. Just like that, Mani, Raja, and PC find perfect rhythm.

Somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, I stumbled into a Chennai theatre, maybe Jayapradha or Woodlands Symphony, to watch a screening of Govind Nihalani’s Ardh Satya. I knew nothing about it, except that Nihalani had directed Drohkaal, which Kamal had remade into Kuruthipunal, a film I admired, incidentally directed by P. C. Sreeram. I went in out of curiosity and came out changed. Ardh Satya was raw, rustic, and emotionally feral. It dealt with the same city, the same systemic rot, the same burden of rage that Nayakan would explore but from the other side of the badge. To this day, I can’t help but feel that its fingerprints are all over Nayakan, not in plot but in tone and texture, in the way men collapse under the weight of doing what they believe is right.

Some call Nayakan the peak of Mani’s career. I don’t. I see it as his first masterpiece, the one that announced not just a voice but a vocabulary. This was the film that drew a perfect line across Tamil cinema, before Nayakan and after. It stood dead center between commercial mass appeal and artistic ambition. A film with no full-length comedy track, no conventional heroism, yet it entertained, moved, and stayed. It made space for quiet and asked questions about power, loyalty, and what a man is allowed to become when the world gives him no choice. Mani would ask these questions again in Thalapathi, Guru and Raavanan each time pushing the edges of heroism further into shadow.

But this was where it began. Nayakan wasn’t just the start of a directorial journey but the blueprint for a generation of filmmakers who wanted to believe that you could do both, tell a story that mattered and pack the theaters.

Velu Naicker was not the hero we asked for. But for a broken world in a broken time, maybe he was the only one who showed up.
May 8, 2025

Thalapathi: A Brother in the Dark

_{This essay is part of the Pesum Padam – Mani Ratnam Retrospective Series and revisits Thalapathi. Watch the retrospective on youtube.}

Shakespeare wrote three great tragedies, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear. The last of these, a bleak study on age, inheritance, and madness, was reimagined by Akira Kurosawa into Ran, a Japanese war epic where a once mighty patriarch walks away from the burning palace he built, reduced to ash by his own choices. Many centuries earlier in India, another sprawling epic, the Mahabharata, had explored, among other major themes, the same questions of loyalty, fate, and the human cost of power.

I thought of both these stories while rewatching Thalapathi, Mani Ratnam’s 1991 interpretation of the Mahabharata through the eyes of its most wounded soul, Karna. Unlike Ran, this film opens not in a palace, but on a dirt path in a nameless village. A girl arrives on a bullock cart, heavily pregnant and barely fourteen. The year is 1959. It is the festival of Bhogi, when people discard the old to welcome the new. But this girl isn’t discarding an old sari or a broken stove. She’s discarding her future. She gives birth in a wooded patch and, in shame, places her child in a goods train. A newborn, wrapped in yellow cloth, left among sacks of grain. As the train rumbles into the sepia night, the girl runs behind it, too late.

I was thirteen the first time I saw Thalapathi. I didn’t know this was a retelling of the Karna story. I didn’t even know what Mahabharata really meant, other than that it was one of those stories they showed on Doordarshan on Sunday mornings, narrated slowly in Hindi-laced Tamil.

Karna, the Mahabharata’s tragic warrior, was a child born to royalty but abandoned at birth, raised by a charioteer’s family, and ultimately bound by loyalty to the very forces that would doom him.

In the years since, I’ve read Rajaji’s abridged Mahabharata. I’ve read Cho’s explanatory version named Mahabharatham Pesukirathu in Thuglak. I’ve spent years reading Jeyamohan’s Venmurasu, his 26,000-page epic retelling every corner of the myth. And each time, I’ve come back to Thalapathi, because Mani doesn’t just adapt the Mahabharata. He examines it with empathy and precision. He finds the fault lines and climbs inside them. Where Vyasa ends Karna’s story with silence, Mani picks up the pen and writes what comes after. Because in Thalapathi, Karna lives a little longer. Long enough to cry for his brother-friend. Long enough to love. And Mani doesn’t place him on a chariot. He puts him in a slum.

Rajinikanth’s Surya is a man born unwanted, raised without a name, and cast out by systems that insist on origin stories. He doesn’t wear divine armor. His protection is rage. His righteousness comes from hunger, his own, and that of those around him. When he meets Deva (Mammootty), the Duryodhana figure, it isn’t a moment of destiny. A wealthy man reaches across caste and class to give him what the world refused: a name, a position, and above all, loyalty. That’s the heart of Thalapathi. It’s not about Kurukeshtra war rather finding out where you belong.

I still remember watching it for the first time, one day before Diwali in 1991. A preview show at Chetpet’s Ega theatre. I was there with my friend Manikandan, two teenage boys seated somewhere in the front rows, holding our breath. And as the frames unspooled I felt something new. This wasn’t just a Rajini film. It also wasn’t just a Mani film. It was something harder to define. An epic tale carried by hand into the 90s, re-dressed in cotton shirts and bata sandals.

Rajinikanth had always been larger than life. But in Thalapathi, he shrinks himself. He lets Surya breathe. Gone are the punchlines and the sunglasses. Mani shoots him in slanted light and silence. You don’t see a hero. You see a man. A man who curls into his mother’s lap and whispers, “Why did you throw me away?” And that, more than the action scenes, is the moment that breaks you.

Santosh Sivan’s camera work feels both painterly and instinctive. Every frame feels carved, not shot. The close-ups are uncomfortably intimate. There’s an unforgettable overhead crane shot when Deva learns that a young girl in the slum has hanged herself. The camera floats, unblinking, as grief and fury pass between him and Surya. Mani, Raaja and Santosh create visual poetry out of moral discomfort.

And Ilaiyaraaja’s music, what can be said that hasn’t been said before? This is not just a soundtrack but also the bloodline of the film. Yamunai Aatrile is Surya’s only glimpse of peace. Chinna Thaai Aval plays like a lullaby soaked in longing. But nothing, nothing, prepares you for Sundari Kannal Oru Sethi.

A song so cinematic, it feels like a film within a film. Inspired by Kurosawa’s war sequences, the song imagines a life Surya will never live: palaces, processions, princely love. The camera sweeps through impossible luxuries. The orchestration is majestic. But at its heart, the sequence is pure hallucination. It’s a dream that will collapse into ash. This is what could have been, and what can never be.

When Deva learns that Surya’s real brother is the collector who’s trying to bring them down, he doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t feel betrayed. He feels proud. “You knew,” he says. “And still you stood by me.” The myth would have made this a moral dilemma. Mani makes it an act of love here.

Thalapathy was released on the same day as Kamal Haasan’s Guna, two titans of Tamil cinema, two of Ilaiyaraaja’s greatest soundtracks, two impossible roles played with ferocity. The audio cassette of Thalapathi was released with six different covers, a first in Indian cinema, turning it into a collector’s dream. I myself had three of them, folded like a poster.

And yet, despite all this firepower, Thalapathi is not a loud film. It is quietly devastating. It is a story about abandonment that chooses not to end in abandonment.

The final scene doesn’t unfold in a palace or a battlefield. It happens at a railway station. Arjun leaves the town with Subbalakshmi. The mother who once gave Surya away choose, this time, to stay behind, with him. The boy once discarded by a train is now embraced, and chosen.

Before I close, let me say something about Karna.

He is one of the most haunting characters in Indian literature. A child born of divine mistake, a warrior caught between blood and belonging, a man whose loyalty outlived his identity. In Vyasa’s epic, Karna is not framed as evil. He is framed as tragic. Not because he was wrong, but because he was never allowed to be right. And that, perhaps more than any other thread, is what makes his story linger, drawing playwrights, filmmakers, and novelists back to him, again and again. But while most tellings only mourn him, Mani dares to ask, what if mourning wasn’t the only option?

The Mahabharata was never wrong. It was complete, for the world it was written in. But our world has changed. So he doesn’t rewrite the Mahabharata. He brings it home to our time. And in doing that, he gives Karna something the epic never did, a life that matters. That quiet act of grace, pulling a shadowed hero into the light, may be Mani Ratnam’s most powerful ending.