Serious Men

 Serious Men: movie on Netflix: 

Based on the book by Manu Joseph, this movie directed by Sudhir Mishra and starring Nawazuddin Siddiqui will make you contemplate n reflect over a lot of things.

Ayyan Mani played by Nawaz, is a smart and confident man belonging to the lower caste n working as a PA to Arvind Acharya (Nassar): a Brahmin Scientist. I mention the caste because the entire movie revolves around this societal hierarchy.

Ayyan has come a long way, is educated and doing okay but his roots and the atrocities that his ancestors suffered keep haunting him all the time. Every now and then he is reminded of his under-privileged status and humiliated by his boss over trivial things.

He is indeed frustrated and struggling to make ends meet and provide a good life to his wife and son. But he is also clever, opinionated and street smart. He is highly determined to go to any extremes to secure the future of his only son Adi, beautifully played by Aakshath Das.

Adi is an innocent kid with a hearing disability. He is vowed to secrecy by his dad. The secret that is soon going to make him the most famous and talked about child in the entire chawl. Yes he is a child genius with IQ of 169. His principal is ready to promote him to class 9th, scholarships come pouring in and soon he even grabs the attention of the local politician to propose and promote their ideas to the downtrodden community and gain their cooperation.

The fame that the father-son duo garners is beyond expectations. It seems now that there is no stopping his son from reaching great heights and achieving laurels which were certainly impossible if Mani would have taken the righteous path.

But soon the downward gradient begins and Ayyan is brought to his senses for a reality check. How the burden of his expectations seemed to have broken the fragile mind and shattered Adi's childhood into pieces. It was time for the dad to choose what was more important- his son who only needed love and support or his false ego hungry for recognition which arose from a deep rooted insecurity.

Serious Men is a story where, everyone from a scientist to politician or a principal to clerk choose the easy but immoral path to fulfill their own agenda. It is also a story of so called modern family with insatiable expectations of parents from their kids. All parents can relate to and perhaps even learn from how this continuous comparison and unjust evaluation of their kid's success is doing more harm than good. It is time to not turn our kids into Serious Men and just let them be and take it easy!

My rating 9/10