Brother Vivek! The Oddly Familiar Soul

There are some experiences that have the ability to strike the deepest chord with you. You don’t understand when they sneak in, how they sneak in, through which avenue they sneak in. But when they shelter in, they develop a symbiotic relationship with your soul.

The character of Brother Vivek, the quirky, lost, rebellious female protagonist from the deliciously contemporary reel called ‘What Are The Odds?’ is one such experience that struck a chord with my heart. I call it an experience because I saw my ‘what-the-f-was-that-phase’ teenage, just-born into-adulthood life play out frame-by-frame in front of me - well almost!

Let’s navigate through a couple of these ‘well- almost’ experiences of Brother Vivek that mirrored mine between age 14-22.

Brother Vivek questions the status quo of, what she considers, the totalitarian culture of educational institutions. She demonstrates her protest by bunking an exam. In parallel, during a rather woke, ‘we-don’t-need-no-education’ phase of my engineering life, I decided to write an exam just enough to crack it - well, that’s what I thought - and bunk the rest of it to attend a rock concert. Well, the concert was one of the best I‘ve witnessed to date, but as far as the results of that exam go, I had to listen to how mum and dad had worked so hard to give me the life that I wanted. You can connect the dots.

Brother Vivek innocently crushes on a much older, tall, heartthrob named Val, frontman of a glorified band. She gets lucky to intern with him thanks to her gifted musical talents. Things go downhill when she finds out the frontman has an equally tall lady-love already in his life. You can feel and hear her balloon of crippling infatuation burst. Brother Vivek defends her feelings to Val through an extremely true-from-heart monologue citing how older men like Jerry Seinfeld, Elvis Presly, Salman Khan (i don’t know how he made her list) date younger females all the time. Val obviously finds this bemusing and like a true gentleman rejects her infatuation with sublime reasoning.

Cut to me in oily pigtails, aged 15, sitting in a corner at my ‘cool’, ‘college-going’ cousin’s house party on a Saturday night. While I was chugging my non-adult drink of nimboo juice, getting scandalized as to how a girl is allowed to hug a boy, my scanner eyes fell on Varun.

Oh dear Varun! Bhaiyaa’s college friend who plays the guitar, wears cool basketball jersey, smiles to break hearts. It was time for my chatterboxness to do its magic. (My mum was at her wit’s end to see recurring remarks of ‘too talkative in the class’ in my school diary. But that was not the ‘work-on-my-remarks’ kind of a day’). Next thing I know, I had built a castle-in-the-air with he and me ‘living happily ever after’ in it.

Brother Vivek had a knack for music, I had a flair for writing. Well at that age, writing poems with rhyming words was pretty much the benchmark of the craft. Then came the day of bhaiyya’s birthday party. The only day when i decided cousins are as important as parents. (We hated each other’s guts. But I could swallow my pride, just for Varun).

From the many poems that I had penned down for him, I chose the one with the most rhyming words. (It couldn’t have gotten more cheesier than that). And there he was, crisply dressed, cracking witty jokes, striking intelligent conversations… holding a girl's hand.

Brother Vivek, I saw my face in you, when for the first time you witnessed Val’s lady hugging him. 

Apart from these oddly familiar instances, never has a character spoken to me with recounting so much resemble to a certain phase of my life.

There are countless other snippets, moments during the movie, down to certain dialogues that I have actually lived through, which makes Brother Vivek’s character even more endearing to me. Although at this juncture of my life, I cannot connect with most of the idiosyncrasies, ideologies, beliefs with you Brother Vivek, you did a brilliant job of tapping into my memory alley, for which I am super thankful.

I adore you Brother Vivek!  Glad we met.