Republic of Akhanda: Where fiction gets real!
In early 2021 I wrote a blogpost called “The Age of Bhakti”. The summary or core theme of the post was this:
When society and its institutions fail...we have no other option but to depend on the divine.
The recent Telugu blockbuster ‘Akhanda’ is a manifestation of the same concept in an over-the-top commercial format.
Most movies operate in the first part of the summary I shared — where society’s institutions fail and a do-gooder hero who is usually above the law of the land comes in to fix things.
In the process our heroes even break the laws of physics as if it is their birthright, and we accept it without questioning or wondering how such things are possible. The whole act of watching movies is a process of suspension of disbelief.
The legendary actor Balakrishna is known to do these gravity and logic defying acts in the most convincing manner and his two previous collaborations with the director Boyapati Srinu have been huge blockbusters at the box office. Akhanda is their third outing together.
But this time they go beyond the regular do-gooder hero and venture into divine territory in a manner that is unheard of till now.
The movie clicked in a massive way at the box-office and is still running in theatres after completing 50 days and having an OTT release. It seems to have thrown its audience into a trance.
It is silly to intellectualize or analyze some movies outside of their fictional context, but I am going to make an exception for Akhanda since it has the capacity to easily blur the lines between fiction and reality.
This post is my reality check for the not-so-fictional context of the movie.
Here it goes…