Feature Image Credits: Reddit, Tamil Labs 2.0

A recipe for disaster – Writer Director Nilesh Krishnaa seems to have perfected this in his latest venture – Annapoorani, “Lady Superstar” Nayanthara’s 75th film. This is how the story goes: In the temple town of Srirangam, a girl child with “extraordinary taste buds” is born to a family whose father works at the Ranganathaswamy temple Madapalli (where holy prasadam is made). The initial scenes also describe the legend of Thuluka Nachiyar, which would appear seemingly disconnected until we learn about the heroine’s close friend “Farhaan” – no prizes for guessing which community he is from, residing in the same town.

Farhaan, the hero, seemingly eggs the girl to defy her parents’ wishes regarding her choice between studying for an MBA or catering, citing that she should not listen to her parents anymore and should start following her own desires. As a child, the heroine is shown to regularly eat at the hero’s home and enjoy the smell of meat at shops. Despite this, the girl says her dad’s upbringing influenced her, and she could not tolerate the sight or touch of meat during a chicken cutting class at her catering college. This is when the hero justifies meat consumption by “quoting” slokas from Valmiki Ramayana, highlighting instances of Rama, Lakshmana hunting animals in the forest and eating meat with Devi Sita; that Lord Murugan disguised as a hunter (vedan) in one of his avatars, and Kannappa Nayanar offering pork to Lord Shiva. This “convinces” our heroine to touch and taste meat and achieve her goal of becoming a world-class chef. This is all the more unbelievable given her orthodox upbringing. An average Iyengar knows what kind of paapam it is to consume meat. If she had been the orthodox girl they portray her to be, she would have countered the same Farhaan with scriptures and stood her ground – heck, this situation wouldn’t have been there in the first place.

Scenes at the catering college portray her shift from abhorring to relishing meat, including binge-eating scenes that seem to be placed conveniently to offend Hindu, and specifically Brahmin sentiments. Her rapid ascent in the culinary world appears inexplicably implausible, transitioning from a college dropout to a Chef de Partie at a 7-star restaurant just because she served food to the head chef and her mentor, played by Dravidianist actor Sathyaraj.

On her wedding day, Farhaan persuades her to run away to Chennai. While doing so, her grandmother catches her red-handed. However, her grandmother supports her decision and tells her to pursue her dream, despite her father’s objection, as the culinary profession requires her to handle and taste meat. Caught deceiving her father about pursuing catering instead of an MBA that her father asked her to, the same grandmother sprinkles holy water around the house as a symbol of purification!

Sathyaraj’s son, another chef and the villain in the film, Ashwin (played by Karthik Kumar), is shown to be an expert in bombs. He plants a bomb in the kitchen oven with such precision that it destroys only her taste buds and leaves the rest of her body fine! Even the gravity-defying stunts of Vijayakanth or Rajinikanth seem convincing compared to this!

So, the director’s subtle propaganda is this – a Hindu guy makes bombs while a Muslim Farhan is the innocent lad.

Factual Errors In The Film

Here are some factual errors the writer has made in the film. These are just a simple search away; spending a few days in Srirangam would have given the writer/director a better perspective. But who cares! 

• The filmmakers try to make it evident that the girl belongs to an orthodox Iyengar (read Brahmin) family, apparent from the Vaishnavite markings on both her father and mother’s foreheads.
• The father’s forehead displays varying Vaishnavite marks at different times.
• Each family member also wears it differently.
• They make it apparent that this orthodox family resides in Srirangam, highlighting the characters’ orthodox nature. However, the heroine is named Annapoorani – something unusual for Vaishnavites when naming their female children.
• The way the orthodox father performs Sandhyavandana is also questionable. 
• The film shows the mother bringing the aarathi to the girl’s bedroom, where she accepts it while sitting on her bed – a scene atypical of an orthodox household – everyone accepts it at the puja room; one does not sit on the bed, even a lazy Hindu would not do that. 
• Despite the Vaishnavite marks on the parents’ foreheads, the heroine seems to be wearing vibhuti – confusion of the constitution!!!
• A typical Iyengar bride wears an Andaal Kondai as a part of her wedding attire on her wedding day – here, some random mix is shown. 
• Her father is shown to be praying at a Ganesha temple in one of the scenes.

All these “mistakes” only point out one thing – lazy research. The writer-director had only one agenda in mind – to portray the girl as a Brahmin from an orthodox family; the rest of it could be any crazy made-up stuff straight out of their imagination and extreme lack of understanding of a community. 

Would the same director have had the courage to show the hero as someone who wanted to become an expert chef and show scenes of cooking pork? We know the answer to this. 

The main agenda is to hurt Hindu and Brahmin sentiments, show Brahmins as lowly as possible and have their “wet dream” on the big screen – typical Dravidoid behaviour. 

Glorifying Islam

Right from the start, there are references to Islam and subtly pushing the message of it being a greater religion than Hindu Dharma. Starting with the story of Thuluka Nachiyar, the best friend Farhaan, eating at Farhaan’s home, learning namaz from Farhaan’s mother to add “taste” to the biryani, and saying biryani is Persian. How can the director talk of Princess Sutharani, aka Thuluka Nachiyar, and not speak of Maalik Kafur, a slave-general from Allauddin Khilji’s army who plundered the same Srirangam and killed over 12000 Vaishnavites in the same place during the same period? It doesn’t matter, it seems.

Farhaan’s mother is shown to be a vegetarian who performs namaz before cooking biryani; in fact, they show her to be a “purer” vegetarian who doesn’t even taste the non-veg food she cooks – she leaves it to Allah, who blesses it and gives it a divine taste. She teaches the same to Annapoorani. However, this woman binges and relishes non-veg, just like how Dravidoids orgasm about. 

In one scene, the grandmother questions the father as to why it is wrong to like/love a Muslim boy and gives the example of Thuluka Nachiyar and how Perumal himself accepted her devotion despite her being a Muslim. So as per her logic, it was okay for Hindus to marry Muslims, since Bhagwan himself did it.

In a later scene, during a competition, Karthik Kumar’s character argues that biryani originated from Persia! No, it was not. You can read the whole thread here.

In the same scene, Nayanthara has to cook biryani, her Achilles’ heel. To solve this, she recalls Farhaan’s mother’s practice of performing namaz before cooking biryani. She pulls a burkha out of nowhere right in the middle of a live show, performs namaz, and cooks the biryani to perfection! Wow… didn’t her parents teach her that a Hindu would pray before and while cooking food? Her father, who cooks at the madapalli, would have been saying a prayer before he cooked the prasadam. In fact, he would have never tasted the prasadam he made before offering it to the deity, yet it would turn out divine every single time! Talk about orthodox!

A food-based film can be shot much more beautifully, making the food do the talking. Food is a tool to irritate a specific community – that’s what its role was in this film. It was all about the thug-voiced Nayanthara. (Deepa Venkat needs to relearn how to modulate her voice for different films). All that we get to see is meat, meat, and meat. The humble vegetarian food is there only to get demonised.

Vegetarian Chefs Do Exist

This movie was released on 1 December 2023. It is unclear when the story was written and the shooting took place. But in January 2023, a vegetarian Marwari Aruna Vijay from Chennai made the news multiple times for her passion for cooking south Indian (more specifically) vegetarian Tamilian food, safeguarding the recipes and spreading awareness of the cuisine of the state, thanks to Masterchef India competition that began around that time. As a Jain, Aruna Vijay stood firm and was willing to be booted out of the show if she was forced to cook non-veg (even eggs). The show allowed her to use paneer as a substitute for meat. Aruna finished among the Top 4 in the competition. She was massively trolled for her stand, and guess what? Religious leaders from her community came out in her support. 

Aruna Vijay is an example of women’s empowerment in the perfect sense.

In the film, Nayanthara speaks lengthy dialogues on “sense”. Had she used some of that sense, aka common sense, she would not have accepted this script or would have refused to enact the scenes in the script. For a milestone movie, Nayanthara has received a drubbing. 

What this movie tries to do is to make meat cool, to brainwash vegetarians that if they do not eat meat, they will lose out on opportunities; if they do not know the taste of meat, they cannot become chefs. Aruna Vijay is a shining example of what one can become if one follows one’s principles and respects one’s Dharma and upbringing.

Cooking does not require one to compromise on our principles. Had she aspired to cook vegetarian dishes like her father, it would have made more sense and would have been appreciated by the public. But to unnecessarily show a meat-eating Brahmin girl who does namaz right in the middle of a live show to get the “taste” of her biryani right is just over the top – The very same reason why it bombed at the box office.

In toto, the writer-director Nilesh Krishnaa, together with Nayanthara, have tried to recreate the Dravidoid wet dream where they salivate at biryani, watch a Brahmin girl eat non-veg food, and defy her parents. Surprisingly, they did not show Annapoorani falling in love with Farhaan, thereby failing to complete the circle of secularism. The Dravidoids would have been disappointed since there was no inter-religious love story or intercaste love story angle. Then, their ideologue’s dream would have come true on screen. Better luck next time, Nilesh Krishnaa, in finding the right recipe for another disaster.

Who knows! He might already be cooking one for the NKCU (Nilesh Krishnaa Cinematic Universe), in which Farhan runs out of gas at his home while trying to cook Biryani and an innocent poor Jamesa Mubin carrying a gas cylinder in a car for his friend gets blasted on the way due to a Brahminical saffron terror conspiracy. And hopefully that film also bombs like this one. That way atleast, the director has a chance of his career graph going up at the propaganda wing of ISIS or as head of Zakir Naik’s creative communications team.

Hydra is a freelance writer and columnist.

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