In contemporary India, corporate branding has often aligned itself with nationalist sentiment, adopting imagery such as the tricolour, Sanskrit slogans or references to ancient achievements to evoke cultural pride. Marketing narratives frequently frame consumption as a patriotic act, linking the choice of a product with the nation’s progress or “self-reliance”. This fusion of commercial messaging and nationalist symbolism serves both to capitalise on the prevailing political mood and to present companies as partners in the nationalist project. An advertisement in The Times of India on August 15, which describes the work of nation-building as a “hustle”, is a good example.

I remember in engineering college my class had a small-minded and vindictive professor in our second year of undergraduate studies. He repeatedly picked on one particular classmate to the extent that, as resentment between the two people escalated, the professor’s actions in one arguably innocuous matter resulted in the student being suspended for a semester. He eventually didn’t have the number of credits he needed to graduate and had to spend six more months redoing many of the same classes. Today, this student is a successful researcher in Europe, having gone on to acquire a graduate degree followed by a PhD from some of the best research institutes in the world.

When we were chatting a few years ago about our batch’s decadal reunion that was coming up, we thought it would be a good idea to attend and, there, rub my friend’s success in this professor’s face. We really wanted to do it because we wanted him to know how petty he had been. But as we discussed how we’d orchestrate this moment, it dawned on us that we’d also be signalling that our achievements don’t amount to more than those necessary to snub him, as if to say they have no greater meaning or purpose. We eventually dropped the idea. At the reunion itself, my friend simply ignored the professor.

India may appear today to have progressed well past Winston Churchill’s belief, expressed in the early 1930s, but to advertise as Zomato has is to imply that it remains on our minds and animates the purpose of what we’re trying to do. It is a juvenile and frankly resentful attitude that also hints at a more deep-seated lack of contentment. The advertisement’s achievement of choice is the Chandrayaan 3 mission, its Vikram lander lit dramatically by sunlight and earthlight and photographed by the Pragyan rover. The landing was a significant achievement, but to claim that that above all else describes contemporary India is also to dismiss the evident truth that a functional space organisation and a democracy in distress can coexist within the same borders. One neither carries nor excuses the other.

In fact, it’s possible to argue that ISRO’s success is at least partly a product of the unusual circumstances of its creation and its privileged place in the administrative structure. Founded by a scientist who worked directly with Jawaharlal Nehru — bypassing the bureaucratic hurdles faced by most others — ISRO was placed under the purview of the prime minister, ensuring it received the political attention, resources, and exemptions that are not typically available to other ministries or public enterprises. In this view, ISRO’s achievements are insulated from the broader fortunes of the country and can’t be taken as a reliable proxy for India’s overall ‘success’.

The question here is: to whose words do we pay attention? Obviously not those of Churchill: his prediction is nearly a century old. In fact, as Ramachandra Guha sets out in the prologue of India After Gandhi (which I’m currently rereading), they seem in their particular context to be untempered and provocative.

In the 1940s, with Indian independence manifestly round the corner, Churchill grumbled that he had not becoming the King’s first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. A decade previously he had tried to rebuild a fading political career on the plank of opposing self-government for Indians. After Gandhi’s ‘salt satyagraha’ of 1930 in protest against taxes on salt, the British government began speaking with Indian nationalists about the possibility of granting the colony dominion status. This was vaguely defined, with no timetable set for its realization. Even so, Churchill called the idea ‘not only fantastic in itself but criminally mischievous in its effects’. Since Indians were not fit for self-government, it was necessary to marshal ‘the sober and resolute forces of the British Empire’ to stall any such possibility.

In 1930 and 1931 Churchill delivered numerous speeches designed to work up, in most unsober form, the constituency opposed to independence for India. Speaking to an audience at the City of London in December 1930, he claimed that if the British left the subcontinent, then an ‘army of white janissaries, officered if necessary from Germany, will be hired to secure the armed ascendancy of the Hindu’.

This said, Guha continues later in the prologue:

The forces that divide India are many. … But there are also forces that have kept India together, that have helped transcend or contain the cleavages of class and culture, that — so far, at least — have nullified those many predictions that India would not stay united and not stay democratic. These moderating influences are far less visible. … they have included individuals as well as institutions.

Indeed, reading through the history of independent India, through the 1940s and ’50s filled with hope and ambition, the turmoil of the ’60s and the ’70s, the Emergency, followed by economic downturn, liberalisation, finally to the rise of Hindu nationalism, it has been clear that the work of the “forces that have kept India together” is unceasing. Earlier, the Constitution’s framework, with its guarantees of rights and democratic representation, provided a common political anchor. Regular elections, a free press, and an independent judiciary reinforced faith in the system even as the linguistic reorganisation of states reduced separatist tensions. National institutions such as the armed forces, civil services, and railways fostered a sense of shared identity across disparate regions.

Equally, integrative political movements and leaders — including the All India Kisan Sabha, trade union federations like INTUC and AITUC, the Janata Party coalition of 1977, Akali leaders in Punjab in the post-1984 period, the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, and so on, as well as Lal Bahadur Shastri, Govind Ballabh Pant, C. Rajagopalachari, Vinoba Bhave, Jayaprakash Narayan, C.N. Annadurai, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and so on — operated despite sharp disagreements largely within constitutional boundaries, sustaining the legitimacy of the Union. Today, however, most of these “forces” are directed at a more cynical cause of disunity: a nationalist ideology that has repeatedly defended itself with deceit, evasion, obfuscation, opportunism, pietism, pretence, subterfuge, vindictiveness, and violence.

In this light, to claim we have “just put in the work, year after year”, as if to suggest India has only been growing from strength to strength, rather than lurching from one crisis to the next and of late becoming a little more balkanised as a result, is plainly disingenuous — and yet entirely in keeping with the alignment of corporate branding with nationalist sentiment, which is designed to create a climate in which criticism of corporate conduct is framed as unpatriotic. When companies wrap themselves in the symbols of the nation and position their products or services as contributions to India’s progress, questioning their practices risks being cast as undermining that progress. This can blunt scrutiny of resource over-extraction, environmental degradation, and exploitative labour practices by accusing dissenters of obstructing development.

Aggressively promoting consumption and consumerism (“fuel your hustle”), which drives profits but also deepens social inequalities in the process, is recast as participating in the patriotic project of economic growth. When corporate campaigns subtly or explicitly endorse certain political agendas, their association with national pride can normalise those positions and marginalise alternative views. In this way, the fusion of commerce and nationalism builds market share while fostering a superficial sense of national harmony, even as it sidelines debates on inequality, exclusion, and the varied experiences of different communities within the nation.

A healthcare client risks IT failure by ignoring outdated infrastructure in favor of an impractical cloud migration plan.

Watch it, but fast-forward through some parts.

Vettaiyan steers clear of unconditionally qualifying “encounter killings” as the only way out — a line many Tamil films have been only too happy to tout of late. There’s in fact an instructive passage at the film’s start that’s probably deliberate. Rajinikanth’s character says there is no personal gain to be had or personal grouse to be avenged in an “encounter killing”, that a police officer who kills in this way has to suffer the “risk” of enquiries by departmental, magisterial, and human-rights commissions, and that the officer may be dismissed or “even” jailed. The choice of words here sets up a narrative whose denouement, pronounced by Rajinikanth’s character in the same scene, is the idea that police personnel are prepared to protect the people at large at risk to their own lives.

The film intercalates elements of this scene with another in which Amitabh Bachchan’s character is being persuasive in his own right about the pitfalls of “encounter killings”. The virtue of this arrangement is that it reveals a fundamental truth about the world: when a narrative triumphs, it isn’t because it has vanquished other narratives. It’s the idea that many narratives, even those at odds with each other, can be simultaneously true, and that we always have the option to choose the one we’d like to adopt — and suddenly the world could look very different. The tenets of populism can fully explain the (alleged) public support for “encounter killings” but the deeper issue is that we need people to want to adopt a different narrative of the phenomenon.

Vettaiyan uses Rajinikanth’s character to embody this arc, and attempts to bend it slowly over its 160-minute runtime to intersect with Amitabh Bachchan’s character’s demand: that we need education as a public service and that it needs to be universally accessible, so that from the more learned foundations that result, people will demand timely justice instead of a rushed one. That there are two scenes later in the narrative explicitly acknowledging the risk of “encounter killings” becoming misappropriated by vested interests — à la Vikram Vedha — is only to the writers’ credit.

In fact, since a single film has come this far, I only wish Vettaiyan also examined the belief, which Rajinikanth’s character articulates in the film without challenge, that “encounter killings” can deter similar crimes in future by scaring potential perpetrators away. Such beliefs are mistaken because they presume there is no relationship between the particulars of violent crimes and how the law punishes them, or overlook it altogether. In reality, there is ample evidence that harsher punishment for a sexual violence conviction can incentivise perpetrators to kill the victims (i.e. prevent their survival) in order to minimise the perpetrators’ chances of being caught.

Nonetheless the film’s decision to draw its driving force from sexual violence, especially gratuitous sexual violence reinforced with graphic imagery, is deeply disconcerting. Repeatedly setting up the ‘dishonouring’ of a woman as the raison d’être of the pursuit of justice is dangerous because it also sets up any crime less heinous — as deemed by the socio-cultural mores of the time — as undeserving of such pursuits. The practice of refrigeration certainly needs to end. The film also maintains the film industry’s tradition of not thinking about the tropes that concern women. The protagonist’s second in command is a woman in both phases of the film — Ritika Singh first and Rohini Molleti second — and the distribution of labour (especially of the tedious variety) and credit is correspondingly lopsided. The antagonist’s lieutenant is a woman, too.

Yet even after all these missteps — and the many others a contemporary superstar vehicle demands — on the scale of badness Vettaiyan steers clear of Annaatthe (undoubtedly Rajinikanth’s worst outing since Baba) and, importantly, of Maharaja, whose diet was even heavier on sexual violence. And to achieve all this, Vettaiyan expects us to overlook all sorts of small but mighty details, including (i) a company’s monarch storing details of the bribes he’s given on the company servers; (ii) a wasp-sized drone that could transmit high-definition images in near-real-time with what could only have been a profoundly energy-dense battery; (iii) an otherwise devious antagonist being unable to think of any ways around a protagonist who’s being a nuisance other than to offer bribes or organise hitmen; and (iv) the spectacle of one-on-one physical violence to pad the otherwise feeble arguments to suspend disbelief.

There’s a fifth detail that’s also my favourite: in many, many Tamil films (and quite possibly in films made around the country; I’m leaving them out only because I haven’t watched most of them), the protagonist has need for great public support to surmount a great challenge — and immediately finds it. I found both parts of Dhanush’s Velailla Pattadhaari completely uninspiring for this reason: both narratives would’ve gone to pot if certain social media posts hadn’t gone viral. Garnering enthusiastic public support for a common cause is an extremely valuable thing and thus quite rare in reality. But in Tamil films it happens with an astounding success rate of 100%.

“These are small prices to pay,” you say, and I’m not so sure. If it weren’t for these details, Vettaiyan would have no feet to stand on. Given a film’s claims to grandness — depicted by the scope of its characters’ actions and the virtues its makers allege the characters are showcasing — we’re often expected to overlook such details. And we do because if we apply this lens to one film at a time, it seems okay. But zoom out and a rash of films comes into view that has progressively rendered the terms of the buy-in more and more exorbitant until, at one point, we’re being asked to overlook patently absurd claims in the service of some unattainable, even deceptive, virtue. Vettaiyan, for example, would’ve had trouble just getting off the ground if that drone hadn’t or achieving any of the major leads in its central procedural without its “fight scenes”.

The film is ultimately a good hand with the misfortune of being erected as a house of cards. And the reason it doesn’t collapse at the first breeze is its principled refusal to lose sight of the corruption at the heart of “encounter killings”.

Featured image: A scene from Vettaiyan (2024). Source: Amazon Prime Video.

Learn how to build a self-hosted CDN using NetBSD, Varnish, and nginx

Learn how to build a self-hosted CDN using OpenBSD base and just 2 packages

Learn how to build a self-hosted CDN using FreeBSD jails, Nginx, Varnish, WireGuard, and PowerDNS to improve media delivery for your website without relying on external providers.