Peer into the night sky of unending expanse littered with glittering celestial objects treating the terrestials on earth with wonder and mystery. And humans with their infinite capacity to pick out patterns and make connections fill in the blanks of the celestial void with inerrant influence of those stars and planets on the individual lives. What look like shapes and patterns in the sky of the stars, constellations and galaxies are mere projections (on a 2D plane, as human eyes cannot sense depth in space) of the human mind as understandable (zodiac) forms, and from there, another leap of faith of extrapolating those forms into exerting control over the individual lives. A few stars make up a certain shape in the sky at the time of the birth, and so this inidividual is bestowed with a distinct set of characteristics... in the end, making everything in the visible universe all about themselves. For all the purported shapes and patterns in the sky that seemingly guide human behavior, the same view of the sky, this time through a powerful telescope, would reveal that these bodies are separated by distances that exceed the comprehension of the human mind and that they could not possibly be in any kind of "pattern" and also that the "space" is in fact just that, a whole lot of empty space. Any (meta-physical) reading into it is the natural penchant of the (logical) mind to make some sense out of it all... to validate its own existence, find its own meaning in a field that is devoid of both. Philosophy is a retro-active application, an after-thought study of inexplicable phenomenon.
"Baththa" is all philosophy wrapped in human angst. Angst has been always the driver for Philosophy. How can the inexplicable be explained, what meaning could do made of the maddening world, how to move along in life that is filled with chaos, randomness and coincidence? What Newton postulated in his action-reaction law of mechanics in the physical world finds serious resonance in the meta-physical world in the form of karmic carry-overs and brought-overs (if in Eastern tradition) or butterfly effects and causalities (on a more practical Western side), all attempting at trying to balance an equation with infinite variables. A pedestrian gets hits by a vehicle and dies. The human mind does not treat (or more, cannot treat) this as an isolated occurrance. It races ahead to find some meaning behind such a random event, to ascribe some cosmological conspiracy to a meaningless loss of life. Of course, his zodiac chart indicated a threat to his life that week, he didn't go on his usual route as the preordained destiny forced him to break his usual pattern, and two steps further down, compare the charts of the driver of the vehicle to the deceased, the positions of the stars are in antagonistic stances.... just some meaning, just some grasping of the straws to make sense of the it. "Baththa" has the eponymous ruffian locked in a school toilet room for more than a week through some chance, and after that near death experience, grateful for a second chance at life, changes his world view of things. On the opposite end is a kid who locks him in accidentally and leaves him there, afraid to let him out fearing a harm to his well being. That's all the setup, the locker and the locked. What a delightful journey the writer-director takes the audience on, charting the transformation of two lives irrevocably, for the better.
The genius of the presentation is how the transformation is all internal to the characters. The situations do not change before the locking in, nor do they, after he gets released. The world moves on in just the same way. What changes however is how the world appears in an entirely new light to him - the food that he complains as inedible before becomes ambrosia now, the wife that was a bother before suddenly becomes his soul mate, his serrated edges before get smoothened out after... The change does not seem out of place, nor his sudden change of heart as commonplace. This happens in real life too - a near death experience forcing a complete turnaround and a makeover of ideology. It reminds on the beautiful dialogue in "athaDu" - rOjoo manam vennela ni choosthoo unTam, eppuDO oka saarae baavundi anipistundi, taeDa akkaDa laedu, ikkaDa undi. It's all about the reading, it's all some greater meaning that the logical mind aspires to (where none exists). The famous quote of Nietzsche comes to aid here - when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you. Quite paradoxically, the void gives out patterns that the mind yearns to make sense of.
A kid gets thrashed by his father in the morning on some act indiscipline, goes to bed at night and gets lost deep in sleep. The dad returns from work late in the night, looks at the peaceful visage of his kid. The nothingness stares back at him, welling up his emotions to the surface, his failure as a parent, his inability at making the kid understand, his thoughtlessness as a tyrant, his taking advantage of the kid's helplessness... and the stream of tears pour down the cheeks... And there is nothing there, just a blank kid's face sleeping peacefully at night. "Baththaa" reads at nothing and understands a whole lot of it.
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