Lessons, Captain taught

This Pongal, I was at home. My first Pongal at home, since I left school. My cousin Arun had also come there. As always, the channels had a lot of movies as part of their Pongal programme lineup. This of course, included all the first time on Indian TV…movies, which we would gladly forgo, if given a choice of watching either those or Andy Warhol’s Sleep (which is a ten hour film that focuses on a sleeping man, and only on him.) What interested us, however were the movies of the most beloved son of the soil, that the Tamil speaking populace have ever seen (trumpets, drum roll, bomb blasts throwing up colourful dust in the background)Captain Vijayakanth- a man whose exploits, include among other things, fighting evil Pakistani militants or saving the nation from the clutches of an immoral minister, whose partners in crime are international mafia bosses or terrorists who threaten to wreck the national integrity of our motherland. He is forever the honest cop. The one man, who is an answer to all vice in the society.

Most people tend to think that he is the greatest comedian ever to have starred in a Tamil movie. Well, for that matter the greatest comedian to have starred in any movie. I was one too, till very recently. Then I decided to take a Captain’s never-mind-if-it-is-bloodshot-eye view of the whole situation. It was, quite literally tough to step into Captain’s robes, for they were too many sizes too large for me. So, I decided to wear my own clothes and take the view from you-know-where. Then, it was more of a vermillion haze in my mind.

When it all cleared up, I knew I had found the answer. The method to Captain’s deceptive-if your-eyes-aren’t-as-bloodshot-as-his madness. Captain’s movies portray him as the ultimate man. It is a mocking parody on the millions of superheroes of the West and their zillion make-believe superpowers.

An average moviegoer who would believe that James Bond (Pierce Brosnan, in Golden Eye) could have an acceleration due to gravity of 20 m/s², finds it hard to believe that Captain could melt a huge block of ice with just a stare from those bloodshot eyeballs of his.

Captain’s computer skills are, well, to say the least the stuff that legends are made of. He is the world’s first and only red-eye hacker who has hacked his way into typing in the Windows Media Player and erasing an upper layer to reveal what is within, (after jooming, of course) in Microsoft Paint. This is of course, an extremely well thought of take on those wiry nerds one gets to see in English movies who hack into just about anything that they like to. The make-believe factor here, is that the guy is normally a brainy chap, who is romantically challenged and avenges that by hacking into some of the most improbable places. So who said, you cannot hack into WMP and type into it? Just that Gates and Co. overlooked it. It took the genius of Captain to figure it out .How, we shall never know. After all, Captain is entitled to his intellectual property, which he might probably share with the other sons of the soil who live by his tenets in those eighteen villages, and not with doubting cynics like you and me. ‘Prove me wrong. If you can!’, he says.

Another topic on which there is a divided opinion among people is on his choice of heroines. Some feel that they are half his age, while there are those die-hard cynics who believe that Captain is something like four times their age. However, everyone accepts the fact that he is roughly seven times as heavy as they are. Needless to say, this is Captain’s moral science education (albeit, in a very teasing way) to the West. He wants to imbibe in people like Michael Douglas the Tam values that he holds, on a higher pedestal than his life, or his sister’s life (who invariably marries the villain and dies at his hands after being separated from Captain), or his wife’s life (who normally lives till the end to see Captain accomplish his mission), or his parents’ life (who walk naively into the villain’s trap, but are rescued in the end) , or his dog’s life (that he doesn’t usually have) and so on…

Then come his dancing skills that would make 50 Cent feel like Fred Astaire. Here’s a man who could make his jaw dance to the tune and let the remaining part of his body wobble as it would please. For the proponent of the Captain’s Jaw form of dancing, he is extremely modest about it and prefers to examine spinning tops on bellies, instead. The clever take that Captain does here, is to silently mock at the pop divas of the current era.

There is also an unverified fact that he holds the record for uttering the most number of di’ s in a given song. Researchers put this value to be around the perimeter of Captain’s belly, in centimeters, rounded off to the nearest natural number, which is presumably, a very large number. This is Captain’s answer to all those Gangsta’ Rappers who drop in a pointless yeah at the drop of a hat. The comparison is particularly interesting because the number of times the latter say yeah in any given song is said to be equal to the perimeter of their tummies. So as they say, a belly for a belly and a di for a yeah.

The greatest things about Captain are his fighting skills. Be it catching a hand grenade and throwing it back at the baddie, or gravity defying mid air miracles, Captain is on home turf. His other achievements include electrocuting electric current with his mind power, having piloted 342344 planes to safety after the pilot had been fatally wounded, giving a 20 minute sermon that changes an evil terrorist into a peace-seeking monk, delivering a wise judgment to about 4567882 cases in about eighteen villages, in a little over three hours, fighting about 157 bald headed baddies per minute in each fight sequence, using bare hands to finish ‘em off even when there is a gun with him, being the foremost upholder of Tam values, and so on. In fact, he is said to be on every Pakistani terrorist group’s hit list as enemy number one. All this, of course are real happenings, as opposed to his other deeds which serve more as a lesson on life and moral principles.

The next time you see Captain, don’t even for a moment, scoff at his enormous belly or his bloodshot eyes. For behind all that, is the mind of a man whose primary mission in life is to teach ethics to the value-deprived social order that we live in today.