Discernment To Resist The Devious

In December last year, I took a trip to Sri Lanka with my school friends. It was my first time in the country. I was excited. Having been exposed to Ramayan from a young age, I was looking forward to places mentioned in the epic. Sure enough, we visited the temple where Rambhakt Hanuman landed in Sri Lanka, the temple where Sita Devi did the agni pariksha and the temple where Hanuman met Sita Devi in Ashoka vatika. It was enthralling, to say the least. However, our driver and guide had a wholly different take on the story.I knew this was coming, but I really didn’t foresee the extent to which it could be retold. Our guide refused to accept Ravan as the villain. He kept glorifying the demon king as a virtuoso, where each of the ten heads signified his prowess in a different skill, and not a depiction of the ten vices. Then, our guide went on to say that Ravan treated Sita Devi better than Sri Rama, just because the former never laid a finger on her. Well, he wouldn’t accept that it was because of a curse that touching another married woman would shatter Ravan to smithereens. Our guide, and, from his stories, I could tell, several others in Lanka believed in the goodness of Ravan, unwilling to see the gross sin of kidnapping a lady for sheer lust and jealousy.Cut to a few days later, I see a video online, where Karn in Mahabharata is portrayed as a wronged character. This is quite common, actually. One of the most famous yesteryear Tamil movies showed Karn dying in such throes of pain that a lot of people to this day and age view the actor playing Sri Krishna as a villain. No one recalls that Karn brought his downfall upon himself. He repeatedly chose to side with the evil Kauravas. He lied to his teacher, Parashuram. He denigrated Draupadi during her disrobing. How can any of this be attributed to nobility? Yet, we find sympathisers for Karn all around us..When I was thinking on these lines, I realised that these are not just characters from our itihasas. They are our everyday villains, too.Haven’t we all seen and grooved to how mafia bosses and druglords are celebrated on-screen? The most viral sequence of the movie Dhurandhar lately was the villain, Rehman Dakait, making a swaggering entrance to broker an arms deal with another militant group. Somehow, base treachery and gross immoral conduct have become ‘cool’. This is not a recent phenomenon. Several movies and TV shows have glorified villains to the extent that we have normalised bad behaviour.While we may think that such behaviour off-screen will shock us, the reality is far from different. There are plenty of news stories in recent months which show drugged teenagers engaging in mindless violence, all set to film songs that glorify such violence. Art indeed imitates reality. Without a discriminating mind, it is easy to mistake the sensuous as the new normal. It is not.When movies set a new style standard or cool quotient for a villain, it is typically to elevate the protagonist who will eventually destroy the enemy. When we think of Ravan or Karn, we must also think that they were smarted by Sri Ram and Arjun, respectively. It would make sense to glorify the virtues the latter embodied.When we fail to apply this lens to every single thing we consume, it is easy to get swayed by the deviant. This could be at the dinner table, at the movie hall, in a friend’s group, or within our own minds. We need to keep asking if we are glamorising the evil and subduing the good. We must anchor only to the virtuous at our altar.

Discernment To Resist The Devious

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