Serious Men 2020

Tormented with his under-privileged societal status, a father capitalizes on his sons newfound fame as a boy-genius. Little does he realize that the secret he harbors will destroy ..

Tormented with his under-privileged societal status, a father capitalizes on his sons newfound fame as a boy-genius. Little does he realize that the secret he harbors will destroy the very thing he loves the most.

Serious Men, the debut novel of journalist Manu Joseph, was published a decade ago in a different, less raucous India. Joseph’s smartly cheeky take on the two “serious men” of his imagination – Arvind Acharya, a Brahmin scientist, and Ayyan Mani, his Dalit personal assistant – is unsentimental but also a sympathetic insider’s view of our grand divides. Joseph’s story and narrative provided, unintentionally or intentionally, a counterview to the platitude about India as a country of contradictions and opposites. The novel stripped the idea that India lives in several centuries at the same time and shows why these polarities can play out dangerously in human lives.

Director Sudhir Mishra is a right fit for this India story. Mishra directs the screen adaptation for Netflix without frills and obsessing about form and style. Through a linear narrative, Mishra allows the intersecting fates of the two protagonists to show us how human-made hierarchies built around caste and social status can fuel savage battles within and outside of us. Writers Bhavesh Mandalia and Abhijit Khuman craft a simple, chronological structure for the story with overlapping layers about class subversion, intellectual ambition, the limits of fame and greed, the weight of caste baggage and courage and vulnerability...