VKpedia

(Much ado about something trivial. The section titles are inspired from The Day of the Jackal.)

Anatomy of a plot

I was going over Google Analytics after a long time this weekend, and I found that I was getting a few hits from Bing for the search term “Koundamani”. A closer look revealed that VKpedia was the fourth search result on Bing for Koundamani. A friend in India told me that he found that my blog was placed first for the same search term on Bing for Sweden. (Wow!)

While I was still celebrating this high note, my friend Shankar posed me a trivia question. Anyone who has listened to FM radio in Chennai would know that some RJs (especially Blade Shankar and Speed Dheena) play a clip from Koundamani when the caller is a woman — “Ai.. ladies!” The poser was “Which movie is this dialogue from?” To someone like me who considers Koundamani the equal of Kamal Hassan and Tom Hanks, the lack of a ready answer was an affront.

Anatomy of a manhunt

Anyone who has cheated by using Google to find an answer, and then promoted the answer as if it was the result of one’s own mental faculties, would know that this is not one of those problems. Because the search terms are generic, but the intended result is super-specific, Google is not an ideal tool for such a search operation.

Twitter is indeed the right tool, for one can tap into the collective intelligence of the masses. This route was pursued, but to little avail, so I was forced to resort my own mental faculties.

The immediate tool of choice was the process of elimination. This is ideal because when someone tries to whittle down to a few options from a filmography as daunting as Kounder’s, selection does not work well. One could eliminate movies from the 80s and from 2000 onwards with confidence. So the movie must be from the 90s. Obviously, the movie must be reasonably popular, and therefore it could not have starred an also-ran actor as the leading man. And obviously, the leading man could not have been Rajnikanth or Kamal Hassan, for I know the combinations well.

Also, the movie is probably not a rural movie. Of course, the term “ladies” is not restricted to the vocabulary of just those who graduated from Ivy League schools, but still I went ahead with this assumption. (Case in point: Gounder tells Sarath Kumar in Suriyan, “Side-la yeng [sic] ladies ellaam varraanga…”) This rules out actors like Vijayakanth, Sathyaraj and Ramarajan, in whose movies, our man plays meaty roles.

So that leaves us with the few actors who play predominantly urban roles, and who generally allow Goundamani a free ride in their movies. In short, Karthik and Arjun.

Anatomy of a kill

We know Karthik-Kounder combos like the back of our hand. So, it is probably an Arjun movie.

Not Gentleman, because we know every single scene from the comedy track. So, it must be Jai Hind or Karna. I could have sworn that the movie was Karna; but then, I started watching scenes from Jai Hind in fast-forward mode. And then, I heard it – boom! Koundamani tells Ranjitha, “Oh, ladies… sorry!” when they are traveling by boat to a terrorist hideout. The previous sentence turned out to be a false alarm. The dialogue in question appears a while later. Arjun and his team reach the terrorist’s basecamp. They are looking out for an ideal moment to strike, when a group of women with guns walk past a guard. And this is the precise moment when the magic happens!

So there you go, Shankar, you might have put my PhD in all-things-Koundamani in jeopardy, but the answer you are looking for is Jai Hind!