Ashwath Marimuthu's Dragon

On Dragon and the all pervasive nature of the Tamil Nadu engineering college lifecycle

Dragon moves into third, fourth and fifth gear in the second half, a curious circumstance considering recent Tamil cinema trend (I don't even know if it is a trend, maybe an inference disproportionately drawn from some big films). The first half is strictly functional, it works purely as a pathway towards director Ashwath Marimuthu's premise - get D Raghavan aka Dragon (Pradeep Ranganathan) back to his engineering college. It is a bit like the ordinary piece of writing in Dragon and Pallavi's (Kayadu Lohar) date, where she does what she claims - ticking boxes by determining what kind of man he is just from a couple of answers and reactions. Ashwath keeps ticking boxes, it doesn't matter that he has Anbu (VJ Siddhu) say that you can't become rich in a single song and goes ahead and makes it happen anyway, or that Dragon is so talented that he can actually keep the job that he was never qualified for. I mean, Python code on paper? Proxy interview fooling an international company's VP? The same company announces its employee's promotion on a big screen like an ad? But none of this matters. Ashwath knows this is all larger than life and he only wants to do one thing: get Dragon back to the engineering college and begin his film.

Rarely has a recent film known its audience so well. It is not a surprise that this film connected with the core Tamil movie going base today and become a blockbuster of sorts. But it is interesting to see how. A lot has to do with Ashwath (he and Pradeep are both engineering graduates who turned to cinema) and his haste to bring Dragon back to the engineering class room. The engineering college and its all too familiar lifecycle is an omnipresent cultural force in Tamil Nadu, at least in the past twenty five years or so. A decade back, you can find a parody or spoof of this lot, how every mile stone in the state is littered with an engineering college or two. There are stories of functioning engineering colleges without classrooms, labs or facilities and in a constant tussle with accreditation or some version of that. It is the abode where both the academically good as well as bad students make their entrance with dreams, albeit stereotypical, in their eyes. Or rather, the stereotypes come from its universal nature. A childhood of ears ringing about how the engineering college is the ultimate destination, never revealing that it is hardly even the beginning of life. It is an extremely recognizable phenomenon in Tamil Nadu. So many colleges that in a desperation to get into the booming IT industry that became every parent's favorite path to success by the end of 90s, any engineering college will do and as long as the kid is in one, life is set. All this to say that getting into an engineering college doesn't feel like an achievement but it also doesn't make one look like a failure no matter what came before it. So when you get a bunch of arrears, all hell breaks loose, as if one failed for the first time in life. Your life was supposed to be good now right? But where did that go? Dragon ends up with 48 arrears and doesn't care.

The Tamil cinema romantic hero too has evolved over the years in the engineering college. Anyone who has watched Ashwath's first film Oh My Kadavule will tell you that it is heavily inspired by films of Gautham Vasudev Menon. Menon was himself an engineering student. He sent his heroes too to engineering colleges - Minnale's Rajesh and Vinnaithaandi Varuvaaya's Karthik did Mechanical Engineering like Menon if I remember correctly. Neethaane En Ponvasantham blossoms in the environs of an engineering college. Over the 2000s, the Tamil cinema romantic male lead came to be dominated by the engineering graduate, if not by numbers, at least culturally. Even Shankar's vigilante films had to include them by way of the Tamil system of "capitation fees". Dragon subsumes all of these years, decades of aspirational text, and distills them into the all too familiar campus from which Raghavan cannot escape. All these films begin their conflicts outside the campus. In Dragon, Ashwath applies the breaks within the campus. What if you look back at your young self and be nonplussed with embarrassment? Usually in a Tamil engineer's life, this embarrassment and realization dawns upon oneself much later. But this is a film and Ashwath loves to dramatize everything, so he rushes Raghavan to face adulthood before 25. A key aspect to this is Mysskin's Mayilvahanan. He has no evil bone in his body, he simply wants Raghavan to grow up quickly and in front of his eyes. I loved how he rattles "I missed you man!", as he walks off after delivering Raghavan his ultimatum. It is as if Mayilvahanan himself is still a student at heart, that's why he's found his calling in running a college.

Experientially Dragon recreates the events, the ennui and bonhomie of these colleges. The arrears, that fucking annoying Digital Signal Processing, lab exams, culturals, and the unremarkable but stress busting canteens and hostels. Visually, Ashwath shoots it in his and Pradeep's alma mater SSN, where GVM is known to shoot his films, a campus seen in so many other Tamil films of 2000s as well. The images themselves light up an audience of a particular age, the ones dominating the conversation in Tamil cinema today. And to his credit, at least in the latter half, Ashwath has the writing to back it up. Just like the campus, a lot of things come back to bite Raghavan, a cigarette flip or a promise or a fainting episode. Even Anupama's Keerthi returns as the college professor, the archetypal too-young-and-attractive-to-be-one. Sure, the film drives home its point about second chances effectively and it makes room for reformation and rehabilitation (precious little of our films do, unfortunately), but I do suspect that the imagery and the staging of this film has a lot to do with how appealing and real it is in its chosen milieu. At least for me.