It is ironic that the movie I watch after Paalayathu Amman is
Puratchikkaaran, a movie that can be classified as being on the other end of the
spectrum from Rama.Narayanan's devotional offering. While the former banked on the people's
belief in God by offering up a tale of the deity performing miracles to save her devotees,
this movie denounces God and charges that the people's belief in God is responsible for all
the ills besetting the country. While it is more mature and better presented that the
devotional movies, the extremity of the propaganda puts one off.
Thamizhmani(Velu Prabhakaran) is a terrorist who propagates the non-existence of God
and to convince people of his beliefs, he kidnaps the heads of the three religions,
Hinduism, Christianity and Islam. A reporter Kanimozhi(Roja) travels to the
forest to interview him and he tells her his story. He was born as a pious Brahmin
Ramanujam but happenings within his family and in his village made him debunk the existence
of God and follow the path of Anna(Satyaraj) an IAS officer turned revolutionary. When
he lost his sister(Kushboo), his wife(Neena) and Anna to the schemings of the village
headman(Radharavi), who used caste as his own toy, he turned into a terrorist.
If Rama.Narayanan's duping gullible viewers by showing miracles on screen is an extreme
case of a filmmaker taking advantage of people's belief in God, Velu Prabhakaran is also guilty
of the same charge. He just goes to the other extreme. Belief in God in intensely personal
and a matter of faith to most people and Prabhakaran strikes at the heart of that. And
unlike Vivek, who debunks people's irrational acts arising out of their belief in God in his
comedy routines, Velu Prabhakaran proclaims that there is no God. So the movie must be taken
as a single man's propaganda vehicle and seen with that frame of mind, it does have some good
points.
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