Actors Russell Crowe, Mohanlal, and Sreenivasan figured briefly in the general discussion on the Budget in the Assembly on Tuesday.
Television journalist-turned-politician Veena George of the CPI(M), brought the subject of cinema into the House when she likened the Opposition’s criticisms of the Budget to the delusional seizures of John Nash, the 1994 Nobel Prize winner for economics who was memorably portrayed by Crowe in the 2001 Oscar award-winning film A Beautiful Mind .
Academy award
Crowe had won the year’s academy award nomination for best actor for his intense portrayal of Nash’s paranoid schizophrenia-driven paroxysms of anxiety and his self-destructive penchant to see conspiracies where none existed. Ms. George said the Opposition’s refusal to accept the possibilities of the Kerala Infrastructure Investment Fund Board resembled Nash’s obsessive rejection of reality.
IUML legislator M. Shamshudeen sardonically countered Ms. George. He said that she need not look afar to Hollywood, for there were better filmy examples closer home that best illustrated the quixotic nature of Finance Minister T.M. Thomas Isaac’s utopian proposals in the Budget to raise funds for infrastructure development through free-floating bonds and Non-Resident Indian (NRI) chits.
The characters were that of Dasan and Vijayan, essayed well by actors Mohanlal and Sreenivasan respectively, in the film Nadodi Kattu , a satirical comedy set in the unemployment-rife Kerala of the 1980s. The jobless youth had foolishly hinged their high hopes of prosperity on two milch cows. As the film's narrative progressed, the doleful moo of the cows, which was initially a “siren of prosperity” for the protagonists, turns into one of “doom” as their unrealistic expectations fail to materialise one after the other.
High hopes
Mr. Shamshudeen warned the government that Dr. Isaac’s high hopes, like those of Dasan and Vijayan, to raise funds from NRIs were misplaced because most Gulf countries were fast replacing foreign workers with their own nationals. Furthermore, Europe and the U.S. were increasingly hostile to migrant workers.
