From 1347 to 1351, nearly 50% of Europe’s population was wiped out because of a plague. However, god did not come to rescue any soul. From 2019 to 2023, millions died due to the Covid virus. Again, god did not come to save any body. Throughout history, war, conquest, famines, and asteroids killed people without any thought. Not to give any spoilers, god stood silent. Perhaps Chuck Palahniuk was right when he comments –
” All god does is watch us and kill us when we get boring.”
So, who cares when people begin to die because of corporate monsters in a small village of remote parts of India? What can a mediocre, selfish taxi driver, with nothing good going on in his life except a few jokes, do when messiahs won’t climb down the ladders of heaven to visit the hells they left behind? After all, shouldn’t we just bow down to karma?
No, man simply doesn’t give up. If not the divine, then the species sapiens are ready to take up the mantle. Every time a tragedy strikes, it is the man with his fragile hands who blessed us and gave the hope. We made antibiotics, built shelters, bent disasters and protected the weak and the meek. In fact, man is ready to become a god for a brief period of time to undo the ill luck inflicted upon the helpless. He can put aside the laws of physics to create a new time-space matrix with his John Wick’s will. He can become the bigger evil to weed out the lesser devil that haunts people in the day. Well, that’s what the protagonist does in this movie by showing courage(Khaleja) in a desert with a James Bond coolness and smoothness showing the audience that he is a sucker for danger and play.
As we enter the 24 frames, the first scene shows the desperation of a character called Siddhappa. A man with complete faith in god decides to find a saviour. Was he right?, Is it logical, though?, Should we wait for a miracle?
It sounds completely foolish. Why would a stranger/knight in shining armour risk everything and come along with him to save a village in a god-forsaken village? But like Adiyogi/Shiva, who roamed the mighty Himalayas, Siddhappa, walks and walks for too long to find the man to save a dying village without any game plan in his hand or strength in his head and heart. The start of a burning funeral pyre in the shot symbolically shows the death of complacency and the urgency that is lurking with hand in glove with death. We sincerely hope that Sylvia Plath was wrong when she noted the following:
” I talk to god but the sky is empty.” And we join the hands to pray to a dead god along with Siddhappa.
As the magic unfolds, the protagonist with his comical acts and through strange ways lands in a desert. Here’s where the transformation and the metamorphosis begin. The humble taxi driver, seeing the pain of a family decides not to ask his cut of insurance money from the family, he struggled hard to find. He’s shown not in a delighted mood. That is, of course, understandable. Showing kindness is hard. It takes courage to transcend ego and our personal needs. This act of charity might be trivial, but it is not. Giving something in a state of scarcity is pretty serious. We all have sob stories to tell. Giving preference to the story of others over the one we are experiencing is unpleasant. The hero too, for a nano second, regrets of doing it. Behind the good persona, we believe in Fyodor Dostoevsky when he says –
” I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.” Isn’t it? We don’t like sharing anything. There’s simply no incentive. The proof is the failure of the communism and the triumph of capitalism. Hobbes was right to an extent when he argues that man forgives murder of his father but not the stealing of his property.
That’s why Raju, the taxi-man, climbs a step up in the ladder of morality when he gives away his money. Is it an overstatement? Not when god himself declares that he is a jealous god in the Bible. Perhaps goodness is a luxury that even gods can’t afford.
Anyway, moving ahead, the dance of fate now connects Siddhappa, and the so-called redeemer Raju. This philosophical meeting is presented well to us. Apparently, the whole nature responds this rare gathering. The desert sand, winds, fire and the sky reverberate with spirit and life. However, in a twist of fate, the wounded and bloodied Raju, the protagonist and the god that Siddhappa waited so long to meet, asks for a help. The God (Raju) falls and crumbles on the shoulders of a simpleton, begging to be saved. This in way shows that even the greats, the masters and the august need a hand. They, too, like us, can shine only for a brief moment.
This episodic event ends the first half of the story. But the hope starts to take a birth. People of Siddhappa’s village think that this man that they are about to save will, in turn, save them. They rejoice and drink fairytales and fantasies. The audience, however, is yet to the see the divine nature of Raju. We believe the Biblical Hypostatic union theory. The idea that Jesus has both the divine and humanness in him. Here, however, we are yet to witness the divine side of the coin. Raju, wounded and tired, rests and wakes up to a shocking reality.
The Cabbie is now officially considered as a god in this village. The common lot begins to bow, few run away. Of course, who would want to piss off a god? Knowing this fact, Raju is indeed surprised. He thinks the village headmen is scheming something fishy and confronts him. No matter what Raju says, the head guy and the villagers would not listen and constantly reiterate the fact that he is indeed the god who has come to save 534 people in the village.
The conversation is interesting. The chief of the village tells him how Raju can make things happen through his sheer will. The poetic scenes of leaves falling, water touching his feet and the wall collapsing on his command indicate not magic powers per se but the idea of change driven by man’s conviction and wish. The villages have taken Kierkegaard’s “Leap of Faith”. They are trying to defy logic, reason and rationality and are now asking Raju to do the same with his will and determination. They indirectly ask him to come out of a mere “Aesthetic” and “Ethical existence” through his determination. To put it succinctly, the power of god is nothing but the power of will directed towards a higher purpose and cause.
Raju doesn’t respond. For a while, he simply watches the tragedies unfolding in front of him in the village. However, the death of a small child triggers something in him. The heroism of humanity cannot handle the inhumanity of the villainy. He charges ahead and fights off the goons for the continuation of a medical camp in the village. When he comes back to the senses, Raju is pissed. He argues with the chief and Siddhappa for indirectly provoking him. By reiterating again that he ain’t a messaih, Raju remarks that if he were a god and has powers, then he should not be asked to kill someone but save the dead child. And as soon as he utters it, the child gains consciousness. Once again, the entire village bows down to this miracle.
The larger miracle is a humble man standing up for other’s cause. The utilitarianism, or the so called larger good than individualism of Raju, triumphed in this moment and made him a god. The fight he fought with the goons is a testament to the moral strength we get when we fight for others. Raju, here, is also making his life worthwhile by living for others. Although he didn’t yet become altruistic and definitely not a Mother Teresa kind of attitude and stuff, Raju showed what compassion can do. I think in a way, it also shows how we need not wait for gods with beards and angels with light. In Schindler’s list, Oskar Schindler did not wait for signals and signs from avatars to save Jews. If we all can stand up for the little injustices that are happening on the road, then man can live without a god. Humans standing for each other can make god an irrelevant concept. To an extent, the renaissance humanism has put the question of what it means to be a human in front of us. The answer should be in doing kind acts and such sort of things. As Fyodor Dostoevsky says , compassion is the chief law of human existence. Is it not? An unjust world needs a man with Clint Eastwood guts and guns, not a god with silence and judgment day morality.
To wide open the philosophical box, do we use god just as an excuse to escape our responsibilities? Stephen Fry, when asked about what he would say if he were to confront god gives this answer –
“I’d say, Bone cancer in children? What’s that about?”. “How dare you? How dare you create a world to which there is such misery that is not our fault? It’s not right, it’s utterly, utterly evil.”
“Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world that is so full of injustice and pain?” Fry said. “That’s what I would say.”
Not to point fingers, can we not lessen the evils ourselves instead of gods? Why should god do something for us? Do we not have the power and the means for almost 99% of the evils? Can we not prevent wars, famines, and so on and so forth?
Why was the world silent when colonies were ravaged? Why is the world silent about genocides? Why do we just offer conversations and not real action? Who’s stopping us from going to Africa and help the poor girls abducted by warring factions?
The answer is we fear responsibility. We escape in the name of god. The hero also does the same now. Unable to take the burden, he tries to escape. When asked about what would the villagers think of it?, he says that they would swear him/god and keep quiet after a few days. After all, that’s what we all do, don’t we?
But the tragedies in our lives will again call god. In that sense, Nietzsche was wrong. God can never die and man can never be free. Science tried to murder, but it was a colossal failure. Humans, simply, cannot bear very much reality, as said by T.S. Eliot. The creative imagination will create it as soon as reality goes unplanned. The villagers blame themselves for the escape of their beloved god. They were scared to accept the reality of the medical camp leaving the tiny village. The incident jolted them and the chief tries to convince them that the god didn’t leave them and will comeback again to rescue the hamlet. It is understandable. The darkest of times need unwavering faith. The losing of faith means death. That’s why the chief lies. Either that or perhaps the chief has come to terms with the reality of Charles Bukowski’s words – ” The gods seldom give but so quickly take.”
Surprisingly, the plot thickens now. Siddhappa followed the god all the way to his home. He’s rattled by that. Raju says that he doesn’t have the strength to do what they are expecting him to do. And he knows only three things in life. Driving a taxi, kicking someone’s ass when things go haywire, get beaten if he faces a powerful foe. Unfazed, Siddhappa hints that Raju is just seeing the seed, but not the potential of becoming a tree once planted in the soil and watered by hope. To cut these philosophical and poetical words, Raju decides to test. He wants to show that he ain’t a god.
Raju stops a stranger on the road and asks for the money. Obviously, he gets scolded for doing that. Seeing a poor kid lying on the road, he now asks for the money for that kid so that the money he would get would be used to buy milk and few cookies. Shockingly, he gets more money than what he expected. It teaches an important lesson for Raju.
He now acknowledges the fact that god isn’t some eccentric entity in the above but an idea of helping hand that pops out of everybody when kindness is demanded in a situation. Simply put god is the man who appears when he intends to be of service to others. Raju now understands the hypostatic union ever present in all individuals. Probably that’s why Gandhi noted that the best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. And Vivekananda, the Indian monk who’s famous for his 1893 Chicago speech, declares that “If you want to find God, serve man. To reach Narayana, you must serve the Daridra Narayanas – the starving millions of India…”.
As expected, Raju with a bass voice, roars that he can now see the god in him and he would help his village despite not sharing blood or soil with them. The rest of the movie plot is just about that. The hero saves the people. The happy ending soothes your soul. Typical yet irresistible.
The end, to use Troy Jollimore’s lingo, leaves you godless, yet you see a good human hanging around. Raju is a metaphor to invoke the goodness in all of us. At least that was the attempt. The movie isn’t about god but the godliness hiding its face in us. The take way for me is fortunately summed up by Ilya Kaminsky in his poetry book Deaf republic –
” At the trial of god, we will ask: Why did you allow all this? And the answer will be an echo: Why did you allow all this? No human has the right to question god on evils.
Note- This essay is a commentary on the Indian Telugu language movie called Khaleja released in 2010.
Thy Vox 