Kadaisi Vivasayi poster. M Manikandan’s latest directorial Kadaisi Vivasayi, as the title suggests, is the story about the last farmer left in a village, which once had a thriving farming community. The film revolves around the farmer Mayandi, played by a wonderful Nallandi, a non-professional actor whose subtle performance is heartwarming and devastating at once.
With the rising cost of farming, depleting water resources and modern work opportunities, farming in the village is on the verge of extinction. Others who farmed vast tracts of lands in the past gave up in the face of massive economic challenges. They sold their farms to the land sharks and settled for less meaningful trades for an easy income. However, the rampant destruction of agriculture in the village meets its greatest challenge in form a skinny, dinosaur of a man, Mayandi.
A real-estate agent tries to persuade Mayandi to sell his piece of agricultural land by offering him three times what he paid others in the village. “Everyone else sold their land for Rs 3 lakh. I will get you Rs 7 lakh for your land. Sell it to me,” the real estate agent tells Mayandi. “Why do you have to go through so much trouble? Take the money and spend the remainder of your life as a king.”
Mayandi, in turn, asks him a simple question: “It is because of that land that I wake up every morning to irrigate it. If I give it up, why would I wake up in the morning?” It’s deep. Mayandi is asking an eternal question. Taking care of the land and keeping it fertile gives his life meaning; it is his reason to wake up each morning. The land represents more than its market value to Mayandi. It is not just a financial inheritance, it represents the cultural, social, and spiritual memory of his lineage. For Mayandi, selling his land is as good as dying. And he wants to live, so he can protect his inheritance but not for the money. He is the last hope of an ancient practice that continues to sustain life on the earth.
Dejected by his failure to lure Mayandi with money and comfort, the real estate agent tells his boss: “He’s too old-fashioned. For the last forty years, he’s hard of hearing and so he has not gained knowledge (of the world). That’s why it’s hard to deceive him.”
The confusion and frustration of the real-estate agent speak volumes of our current predicament: knowledge is a curse. In this information age, we have all the information we need at our fingertips and yet we are lost.
Mayandi may seem less informed and his life could seem mundane. But, take a close look, he’s happy, healthy, and independent.
For Mayandi, nothing is too good to be true. Ramaiah, played by Vijay Sethupathi, is believed to have gone mad over his dead lover by other villagers. In a scene, a group of villagers laugh at Ramaiah when he tells them he met Bill Gates on his way to the village and spoke with him. Nobody believes him until they hear on the radio that Gates is touring Tamil Nadu for his charity. When Ramaiah tells Mayandi that he met Lord Murugan, Mayandi asks him, “What did he say?”
The farmer doesn’t mistrust anyone or judges people’s stories with his own bias. He just listens to them with empathy. For, he knows, every person has his own truth.
Manikandan tackles the questions about God, faith and the idea of transcendence. One elderlly man shows a stone in the middle of nowhere and tells a young man, “This is our deity?” The young man asks, “Doesn’t our deity have an idol?” The old says, “No, we don’t.” They simply believe the stone is their god, and their faith makes it so. Their deities are people who lived among them and achieved the highest level of consciousness. “We believe that when one transcends thought, he becomes god,” says the old man.
Ramaiah is on his own path of spiritual transcendence. And only Mayandi sees it.
Kadaisi Vivasayi is now streaming on SonyLiv.
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