My Lockdown Discoveries: Mani Ratnam’s “Terrorism Trilogy” and the movie fan inside me

I became an avid movie lover just over two years ago, and it was because I got so bored during my classes (back in the days where we used to see people face-to-face.) I used to only watch Telugu movies and some Hindi movies nearly every week, and it was my friend that first introduced me to Tamil movies. That was the start of a journey I took throughout the world of South Indian cinema.

I believe that it was just around lockdown when I had found out about Mani Ratnam’s movies. I had watched a few of his movies (like OK Kanmani) back when I didn’t pay much attention to movies, but during the lockdown, all I did was search up “Mani Ratnam movies” on Google and impulsively pick one to watch. I completely fell in love with Mani Ratnam’s stories and his methods of storytelling. Every single one of his movies I watched, from CCV to Thalapathi, had (in some way or another) mesmerized me. Even Agni Natchathiram, although I’m not a huge fan of masala/action, had managed to impress me. The one movie that I have wanted to watch for a while, even before my “discovery” of Mani Ratnam movies, was Bombay, starring Aravind Swamy and Manisha Koirala.

I remember my mom always telling me and my sister, “Nuvvu Bombay chudaali. Chaala manchi cinema.” (translation: You should watch Bombay. It’s a really good movie.) I remember writing it down on my long, long list of movies that I wanted to watch, but it never happened. Then, the lockdown rolled around, and I had a whole lot of time to complete my watchlist. And it just so happened that on one weekday night, on a whim, I decided I was going to watch Bombay (which was somewhere at the bottom of my list). And that’s exactly what I did, but I never imagined that it would leave such an impact on me.

That day, I sat down on my couch and had my laptop on my lap, playing Bombay on it (in Tamil, of course). It was probably 9 in the night. I was quite tired, and I was struggling to focus on the English subtitles scrolling on the bottom, but as the movie progressed, I found myself quite indulged in it. My eyes were very dry from the excessive online schoolwork, but I couldn’t close them for even a second of the movie. I didn’t want to miss even the tiniest detail in it.

Near the end of the movie, during the riots, I looked up from my laptop to what was playing on our TV— news about the then-recent Black Lives Matter protests near me in the US. Seeing both the Bombay riots and the BLM protests playing out in front of me wasn’t exactly the world‘s most pleasant thing.

But after watching Bombay, I felt motivated to finish watching Mani Ratnam’s “Terrorism Trilogy,” which are probably my favorite among almost all of his movies. Even though all three of them (Roja, Bombay, and Dil Se) might have seemed to be in the same genre, Romance/Terrorism, each of them had their own distinct characteristics that set them apart into their own sub-genre. For Roja, it’s patriotism and love through terrorism. For Bombay, it’s religion and love through religious riots. In the case of Dil Se, which I personally thought had the most terrorism of all the three, it literally took the terrorism in Roja and Bombay and characterized it to be a humane and sympathetic main character in the movie.

Each of the three terrorism movies also seemed to be associated with a certain primary color (at least in my opinion). For Roja, it was red, for Bombay, it was blue, and for Dil Se, it was yellow. This might’ve been quite a stretch (or maybe a fan theory), but for a while, I wondered if having the three terrorism movies display one of three primary colors each was purposefully created like that. The idea of it reminded me of Ayutha Ezhuthu a bit...

Besides this, what struck me most about the trilogy was how realistic each cinema was. If you take a look at the first ten-ish minutes of Bombay, you see that Aravind Swamy is being caught up on the things that happened while he was gone. This is when he sees Manisha Koirala, and it's love at first sight. Normally, we would label love at first sight as something that's unrealistic, but Mani Ratnam manages to root not only this love story, but almost all of his love stories, deep into reality. He never glorifies the love to anything beyond the purity we saw when their eyes met. (In my opinion, there's a certain beauty to something kept so simple.) In a typical mainstream movie we would have seen in the past few years, the hero would have fallen in love at first sight with the heroine because of how she looks, and then the heroine would fall in love with the hero once he shows off his skills in a fight, but it doesn't feel realistic at all when compared to the romance we see in Mani Ratnam's movies.

Slowly, I realized that these movies didn’t just impact me now. They impacted me as a child. After I watched all three Terrorism movies, I got hooked onto the songs that A. R. Rahman composed (and, as fate had it, I became an A. R. Rahman fan as well.) As I listened to them, I started singing them around the house, and my parents told me that these were the songs that we used to listen to all the time on long road trips when I was a little kid. Songs like “Dil Se Re” and “Kaadhal Rojave” were the ones that I really enjoyed as a child, and even more now, especially now that I’ve rediscovered them for myself during this lockdown.