Even as Covid-19 ravages India, paralysing the economy and public life, it has had strange side-effects in some zones: it has stimulated certain aspects of life and sectors of the economy to new trajectories of imagination, and modes of functioning. With physical isolation becoming the norm, people are forced to relinquish many things they had taken for granted—completely foregoing certain comforts, services, journeys, congregations and products—and look for virtual or other alternatives. When the playing fields are thus brutally and inescapably levelled, it is the heavy, monolithic machineries and systems that are the worst affected: used to the rut and unable to adjust and adapt, they are totally immobilised. Their set norms and institutionalised advantages go for a toss. In contrast, systems and modes of functioning that are light, agile and flexible find it easier to survive—even thrive. Covid-19 came as a crisis that provided one such unexpected but positive break for the Malayalam film industry: it created a clean slate of sorts, even an inversion of order...
