The misfits we need

KOCHI: The opening shot reveals a dark dingy room. A man with long hair and unshaven beard emerges, his head hanging, deep in thought, as the music progresses to reveal a lurking danger. The ‘psycho’ moves through, taking a metal stick in hand, a bucket and some tools and walks out. He starts digging the earth, the suspense builds, and you are almost expecting to see someone dead. 

But here comes the twist. Digging out the parched piece of earth, he pulls a plant out of the bucket, plants it and pours water around it. Mahesh K Narayanan’s ‘The Natural Psycho’ will hit all the right notes if you are someone who cares about the world around in your own unique way. A sculptor and artist, Mahesh and his friend Aneesh Koppam, who wrote the story and acted as the ‘noble natural psycho’, were stranded in Chitradurga, Karnataka, after being stationed there for a project.

“Looking out, you see drought here. Water levels are falling and nature is struggling. Everyone is thinking about the lockdown, boredom and inconvenience it caused in their life, but we forget that we turned nature from a nurturing force into a formidable one,” he says.

The short movie has attracted good feedback from its viewers as well as eminent personalities like director Nadirsha. The six-minute film tells you that taking care of nature might make people think you are a misfit, for not belonging to the flair and glimmer of the society, but it is those visionaries that keep this world intact. The production, direction, editing, camera and screenplay was handled by Mahesh, while art direction was rendered by Aneesh Koppam. The narration in Malayalam is by Devan Koppam and in English by Ambili Nair. You can find the film on YouTube-channel ‘Popular Malayalam Media’.