జై బాలయ్య!

Once upon a time, movies and dramas in Telugu used to portray stories from puranas, itihasas though diluted with personal agendas of actors, writers and directors. When not from itihasas, they had fantastic stories inspired from various folk tales. Away from folk tales are those movies that were set in the near-part or the current society of that time. They did not stray very far from the practices, beliefs of their audiences.

In a swift move, movies overthrew dramas in Telugu as the means of entertainment at mass. Over stimulation of the base human emotions from movies opiated the masses. This resulted in a dire need to show the lead actor a step above from rest of the cast became a norm and went to such extremes that the stories no longer took place in a society that average audience know. Traditions, religion, human relations got pushed to a remote corner. They only had to be touched with a long stick, with only a passing reference of them in the story or when some stupid religious practice that the director dreams of after a smoking weed has to be shown.

In the current state, the bar is so low that a very rough caricature of a Shiva bhakta as a hero of the movie with a meaningless story line and awful taking, was enough to make the crowd crazy that Telugu movies give more place to traditions and religion. 

True! The guts of the director have to be respected and appreciated for taking this specific story line, but going by his previous movies, the sole intention here can be to allow the hero to perform things that normal humans cannot perform, by declaring him as Lord Shiva. It does not feel like he intended to glorify the religion.

Sprinkle some words from sanskritam here and there, a long monologue with an utterly meaning less shloka paadam (అహింసా పరమో ధర్మః, ధర్మ హింసా తథైవచ - does not make a full verse or shloka) about ahimsa, some scenes with the lead actress losing her heart to a person who is old enough to be her uncle, really bad scene that can cause the kid character to get PTSD by watching his mom violated and her perpetrator killed brutally, sentiments of a mother losing one of her two children - you have a block buster. Treating it as anything else is a grave mistake. 

At the end of the day, the movie has to provide entertainment to majority of its audience and this movie succeeded in doing that. When you have Balayya performing rudra tandavam to Thaman's ear piercing, heart-pounding beats from what seems to be like 1000 drums at once, what other trance do the audience needs, that too when covid-19 deprived them of a senior hero's movie for close to two years. కరువు తీర్చాడు బాలయ్య బాబు. జై బాలయ్య!