Q's Brahman Naman, a sex comedy with a conscience, is a must watch

Though I am not a serious video game player myself, as an old time fan of the early seasons of The Big Bang Theory, I recall The Barbarian Sublimation, an episode where the (non-nerdy) female character Penny (Kaley Cuoco) is introduced to the World of Warcraft, a popular MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game).

She desperately seeks an escape to cope up with her relationship problems through the game.

By the end of the episode, she is addicted to it and considers going out "virtually" with the gaming avatar of Wolowitz (Simon Helberg).

She chops off her ex, Leonard’s head online and this provides her an outlet for her frustration, which her nerd friends neither share nor understand.

An MMORPG is, by itself, harmless: but metaphorically speaking, the concept can be used to demonstrate some unsavoury truths about the post-internet era.

Let’s examine the premise: millions of people all around the world, agreeing to participate in a grand delusion, a mutually agreed upon falsehood: every player guards his/her privacy, but participates vigorously from behind the online veneer. 

You have just described the appeal of every single "underground" film of the 21st century, especially the filmography of Qaushiq Mukherjee, aka Q.

I enjoy his films delayed, and every time I watch them, I have more questions in my head than answers. Kyu?

Recently then, I watched Brahman Naman - his latest film, the first Indian one to have been picked up by Netflix.

Digitally released, it takes a detailed peep into the 80s India, and the private/public lives of nerd quizzers played by Shashank Arora, Tanmay Dhanania, Chaitanya Varad and Vaiswath Shankar.

Since the internet was yet to answer most of their sexual queries, they make do with erotic magazines and the usual "socially established" ways of objectifying women.

In fact, Naman the genius quizzer cannot so much as raise his head to talk to women.

His perversion is something that we all must have encountered somewhere-sometime-in-our-lives, but we won’t talk about it. "Tina, Bina, Who cares? All cunts."

While on one hand, there is too much noise about winning quizzes, we critically view the cold silence around the inner lives of Naman and his friends.

Underneath all experiences, they try and fail to grasp the "unknown", resulting in the continuation of their stupidity and a complete failure as "enlightened" subjects.

And this is a job well done, for the film does not glorify nerds and questions if intellect is all that one must strive for.

What if many social problems can be traced back to a bunch of nerds and their complete distance from the larger spectrum of reality?

Sure they may be great quizzers, but we are also confronted with the dangers of the "One Factual Answer To Everything" formula that they had mastered.

The inability to bridge different forms of knowledge is the coming-of-age story of millions of adolescents even today.

What makes it worse is the facade put up by most adults, who instead of a healthy dialogue, end up hushing up a lot of mass prejudices, which the later generations find difficult to rub off (Science > Commerce> Arts, for example).

One must also note that mass prejudice functions very much like a MMORPG: a large number of people, behaving as per an agreed-upon fantasy.

To illustrate this, the film exposes the vices of both Brahmans and quizzers (super-geeks), by drawing clever parallels between them.

Take for instance, three things that come naturally to the quizzer community in the film: region-based fighting (Calcutta vs Bangalore), casteism and sexism.

In the first drinking scene at Roti Land Dhaba, addressing the waiter as "Garcon", Naman says "Brahmans must be magnanimous to the servant classes to maintain the natural order of things."

He also passes on an interesting bit of advice to his relatively less nerdy buddy Randeep (Randy), stating that if he continues to display "slavish deference" and "obsequiousness to God, ie, me (Naman)", he can dream of being in their quiz team someday!

Both quizzing and Brahmanical knowledge is shown as elitist, but thought of as unique or indispensable kinds of knowledge by insiders.

And let’s not forget the burst of literature (Shakespeare) in Naman’s speech every now and then, just to show off the poetry in his scheme of things (or to hide the lack thereof).

A lot about this film is also about the ones who resist the "Naman order of things", no matter how unsuccessful they are.

Women like Naina, Yasmin and Rani who participate in the South Zone Championship, are equally talented and aware of male privileges.

Naina, who points out the hypocrisy of her caste and the lack of choices is perhaps more enlightened than any of the nerds in the film. "You don’t need much persuasion in a Brahman family, Sir, Study, Study, Quizzing is good for you…"

Even though Q’s films have often been criticised for being male-centric, I would still say that is a simplistic view. For we must pay attention to characters like Naina and Ash, their struggles and the amount of social criticism they offer to the film.

In a recent interview with The Hindu, Q said: "What you start with is not what you end with. You start with the promise of [sex] but end with a slap. That’s what happens to these guys. I think there is a feminist message. My way of looking at women has always been that."

Q isn’t quite an auteur, in my opinion - yet, that is. But make no mistake, he is taking rapid strides on that road.

With Netflix, he has forged an alliance that is almost poetic in its subversion of popular taste: his films, most of them, will never fill cinema halls because they are not meant to be consumed as part of an increasingly soulless, vapidly public spectacle of multiplexes and "safe" entertainment.

Films like Brahman Naman are a private affair, albeit a private affair shared by 120 million people across 190 nations: an MMORPG-like exercise with a conscience.