{"id":372,"date":"2016-04-03T11:55:46","date_gmt":"2016-04-03T11:55:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=372"},"modified":"2016-04-03T11:55:46","modified_gmt":"2016-04-03T11:55:46","slug":"brahman-naman-the-trouble-with-tharak-netflix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=372","title":{"rendered":"Brahman Naman &#038; The Trouble With Tharak"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><span class=\"dropcap\">I<\/span>n a scene from Q\u2019s Brahman Naman, the protagonist Naman and his two friends are sitting on a pavement in Bangalore, watching a woman and her little sister pass by. The setting is the early 1980s, a time when the city could still pass off as a small town. The sequence is shot in slow motion \u2013 the three men transfixed as their eyes hover, like a drunk fly, from the woman\u2019s legs to her thighs, to her derri\u00e8re, reducing her to various anatomical parts, both seen and imagined. In other words, a classic case of \u201cobjectification\u201d, and what men would invariably term \u201cchecking the girl out\u201d. As for me, shifting from checking a woman out during my teens, to calling it objectification when I am almost pushing middle age, is where I think I grew up.\n\nI was raised in Nagpur during the late decades of the 1990s. Our collective reality comprised of a sleepy residential area, lined by trees, the avenues favoured by old men for evening walks in the colony. The town\u2019s slowness was punctured only by the constant complaints of aunties about their useless sons and morally ambiguous daughters during weekend kitty parties, while our dads instilled in us the qualities of being born a Brahmin, the twice-born caste. Away from the gaze of our parents, my friends and I did what most teenagers do. We frequented seedy bars, bought cigarettes, and lusted after the body of Jennifer Lopez, whose \u201cWaiting For Tonight\u201d was pushing our testosterone to maddening levels.\n\nThis is the small-town hormonal milieu that Brahman Naman aces. Long after my laughter over its numerous funny scenes and incredibly witty dialogue had passed, I realised that no other film in present memory had, so powerfully and beautifully, captured a certain kind of Indian man: Growing up in a mofussil land, driven crazy by his hormones, and absolutely no way to channel or sate his desire.\n\nAnother scene from the film stands out for me. Naman, who is lusting after Rita, the girl he and his friends watch on the road, is in a train bound for Calcutta for a quiz show. The boys meet some girls from Madras and soon, Naman falls head over heels for Naina. After a drunk evening spent talking, he passes out in his bunk and dreams of Naina transforming into Rita, and Rita becoming Naina. Rita dressed in lingerie, Naina in a pair of \u201cdecent\u201d shorts: One, an object of his affection, the other, of his lust, the \u201cwhore\u201d and the \u201cgoddess\u201d entwined together. Is there a better explanation of confused male sexuality than this riveting scene?\n<\/p><p style=\"text-align: center;\">***<\/p>\nI still remember that distant afternoon when I had just joined college. My then best friend, let\u2019s call him V, took me out for a few drinks. I was still a lightweight then, while V had already proven himself a champion \u2013 in alcohol consumption as well as on the subject of women. Through the course the afternoon, he relayed to me, like a guru to his disciple, the mysterious art of checking girls out.\n\u201cKeep your head down. Be surreptitious,\u201d he advised, like a teacher adept in a curriculum of his own making. \u201cDon\u2019t ogle. You shouldn\u2019t come across as someone creepy. Slowly, like an aesthete, glance \u2013 for remember, a thing of beauty, is a joy forever! Avoid her eyes.\u201d It was as if this very ritual was a rite de passage, an entry into the hallowed portals of adulthood. If a man failed here, he could surely expect to fail at other crucial quarters. I, of course, could never rise up to V\u2019s expectations of becoming an ace aesthete, for I\u2019d always end up making eye contact, which would land me in a middle-class Brahmin purgatory of shame. I\u2019d immediately look down, scared, and thereby, as V put it, \u201close the game\u201d.\n\nIt was only later, as I began to read widely, that I slowly came to understand the difference between a man\u2019s interpretation of checking out a girl, and any sane person\u2019s idea of objectification. And the answer to that difference lies in the very fragility of our masculinity.\n<blockquote class=\"quote--center\">We refuse to see a woman on her own terms, for who she is, rather than solely on ours. And this is why men do not deserve the women we are with.<\/blockquote>\nIn many ways, Brahman Naman, is a telling comment on this fragility. Naman is an ace quizzer, a \u201cBrahmin fundamentalist\u201d, a chauvinist, and an all-round loser. This latter definition emerges gradually in the second half. Filtered through Naman\u2019s trivia-filled consciousness and his lofty, almost arcane British dialect, what really comes through is his failure with both real and imaginary women.\nNaman\u2019s dreams of that prized acquisition \u2013 coitus \u2013 are thwarted when Rita sees through him on their first meeting and calls him a coward. With Ash, a lovelorn girl on his quiz team who pines for him, we see Naman\u2019s utter ugliness. He isn\u2019t interested in Ash because she has severe acne \u2013 and when the two try to kiss, he has her face covered in a veil.\n\nThese little moments of unpleasantness are peppered throughout the film. Toward the end, we are left with the same lingering questions \u2013 will Naman ever have a moment of clarity about his actions? And more than anything, is he ever going to be capable of love?\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">***<\/p>\nSome of these questions resonated during my first year of college. I fell in love for the first time with a person I am going to call UD. I met her in the long corridor that led up to the English department. On that fateful day, for one split moment, it was as if words ceased to exist. When she extended her hand, I caught her wrist, dropped my bag, picked it up, my eyes and face flushed with shame and embarrassment. I remember mumbling some flimsy excuse and walking away. And all V could say was, \u201cDid you see those titties on her?\u201d If I had a hammer then, I\u2019d have taken it to V\u2019s jaw.\n\nIn the odious nights that followed, I would lie awake, my head swirling with hybrid images of UD, and other anonymous women whom I had met. Years later when I look back upon those days, a curious question runs through my mind: During those heady days when desire overruled our hearts and nether organs, were we capable of love? Did it exist? Does it exist?\n\nNaman too is unable to come to a conclusion about whether he can love. In my case, long after UD and I broke up and moved to different cities, I asked her the reason why we couldn\u2019t be together. She replied in words that were as simple as they were vague: \u201cYou were coward enough to not say the right words. You never said them.\u201d\n\nNaman doesn\u2019t either. And here\u2019s why we men are losers. We refuse to see a woman on her own terms, for who she is, rather than solely on ours. And this is why men do not deserve the women we are with. Even at the end of the film, we are not told whether Naman ever grows up. As a viewer, though, with a fairly chequered romantic past, I hope he eventually does.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For me, shifting from checking a woman out during my teens, to calling it objectification when I am almost pushing middle age, is where I think I grew up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":69,"featured_media":373,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pop-culture"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Brahman Naman &amp; The Trouble With Tharak<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"For me, shifting from checking a woman out during my teens, to calling it objectification when I am almost pushing middle age, is where I think I grew up.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.arre.co.in\/?p=372\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Brahman Naman &amp; 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