Dragon: I remembered Clayton Christensen’s moral book for high flying MBAs
Yesterday, I got an opportunity to watch Dragon, the new Tamil film featuring Pradeep Ranganathan and directed by Ashwath Marimuthu. It was a beautiful, ‘feel-good’, morality film but told in such a light and refreshing way.
My guruji Clayton Christensen used to teach his Harvard MBAs lessons on morality, ethics and what it means to be successful in life. He wrote a book titled ‘How will you measure your life?’ which was an instant best seller. The book explored how to find lasting happiness and success by applying business theories to personal life, focusing on redefining success, strong relationships, and staying true to one’s values. Clay also gave a TEDx talk on this topic.
How Will You Measure Your Life? Clay Christensen at TEDxBoston
Director Ashwath has delivered a film that talks about how to lead a happy and fulfilling life by staying true to one’s own values and virtues. While it sounds preachy, the film is a light hearted entertainer that preaches without preaching. In a way, Ashwath has entered into the zone ruled by Rajkumar Hirani and has succeeded mightily too.
There are three things that I liked in the film
- The clever writing by the director with convincing character arcs for everyone from Pradeep to Mysskin to even the house owner. Pradeep’s character arc is similar to Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s journey.
Pradeep starts the call to adventures after his love proposal gets rejected by his schoolmate. His romantic crush was more inclined towards ‘bad boys’ and not the top ranking ‘good boys’. He crosses the threshold from the good boy to the bad boy at two levels. At the first level, he changes his image to showcase that he is a bad boy in college who can do bold things. At the second level, he actually becomes a bad boy by crossing the morality threshold by cheating the interviewer, fudging information only to be found later when he experiences death of his ‘dragon’ identity.
His rebirth and revelation happens during the marriage scene where he atones and finally changes himself. In this process, his old definition of success around image, money and fames dies. A new Dragon was born whose definition of success is around playing by the rules, being truthful, working hard and being at peace with himself. Every step in the journey was well crafted.
2. The refreshing aspect around morality and goodness in a Tamil film which is known for promoting heroism that is centered around violence, sexual abuse and all kinds of immoral things. In this film, every character had a shade of grey and also, goodness in equal measures like humans with a skew towards goodness. This is such an important switch for Tamil cinema.
3. The highlight of the film was the climax when his father gives his unconditional love to Pradeep. I melted in that scene. It was such a beautifully conceived shot and the two actors were just outstanding. Pradeep’s character let all its weight and guilt out through his brilliant acting. The dialogues, the music and the set up of the shot was just outstanding.
The film is important for the younger generation because as kids we don’t get to ask counterintuitive questions or understand counter narratives. I was in Mexico four times in the last 2 years as we were building a social venture to help young mothers, who lost out on learning and earning, on how to become employable. Mexico has the highest incidence of teenage pregnancies in the world. I met mothers who got pregnant at 11 and 12 years of age, one of whom now lives with 5 kids from 3 different partners at the age of 21.
When asked about their life as a mother, these mothers say that they had a romantic notion of motherhood and little did they realize that motherhood means no sleep at night, no rest at anytime of the day, no time for themselves, no meeting friends, no playing and so on and so forth. They never had counternarratives and had a fictitious and romanticized notion of motherhood which led them to their current life.
When I was a college student in India, I had romanticized notions of adulthood, marriage, work and many things in life. I also didn’t have counter narratives because of which I made some stupid choices in life too. But I was lucky that I was surrounded by amazing people and I was able to navigate the difficulties with good support. But that is not going to be the case for many students. Movies are a great medium to pass good messages in a easy to understand, engaging and light hearted way.
Kudos to team Dragon, especially Director Ashwath and lead actor Pradeep for making it all cheerful, engaging and hard hitting.
