I accidentally watched Madathy (2019), and it didn’t feel like a movie—it felt like a wound being gently but firmly opened.
The film doesn’t scream. It doesn’t sermonize. It walks—through the lives of the so-called untouchables, through women’s bodies turned into sites of control and pleasure, through nature, animals, silence, and suppressed rage. The donkey, the wild, the land—every metaphor exposes how society treats those it deems “lesser.”
It covers women with dignity and exposes men without mercy.
What’s striking is what the film doesn’t fully touch—the brahmanical canvas—yet even without naming it directly, the rot is unmistakable. Madathy protests reality simply by showing it as it is.
And then I look around today.
We claim the cow is sacred, yet fellow human beings are killed in its name. Does our ministers welcome foreign delegates with cow dung and cow urine rituals? so I ask:
If it is culture when performed for power, why is it violence when questioned for humanity?
India, at its core, still holds culture, diversity, and values. But a large majority is silent—like sleeper cells of hatred, waiting to be triggered. If the brain is not deployed among the silent, hatred finds easy targets:
a “Baba” on a textile board,
a shop owner with a Muslim name,
a woman in Nainital who stood up for minorities,
a Muhammad Deepak who chose humanity over fear.
These are not isolated incidents. They are symptoms.
Films like Madathy are not just art—they are warnings. They ask uncomfortable questions that streets, courts, and newsrooms often fail to ask.
So here’s the question to 140 crore Indians:
How long will we confuse tradition with cruelty, silence with peace, and faith with fear?
And when history asks what we did—will we say we watched… or that we spoke?
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