Why Pushpa 2 is the greatest movie of all time

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Dante Alighieri once said: There’s a special rung in hell for those who watch dubbed Telugu movies in Hindi. Deeper than the one housing those who remain neutral during times of moral turpitude.

But let’s start from the beginning. Like JD Vance, yours truly married a far smarter Telugu woman, which means that one now has to watch all movies in the OG language. However, I am not complaining because Telugu cinema is the most joyous art form to exist, the antithesis of neo-realist Bengali cinema about existential angst of CR park uncles who have read too much Jhumpa Lahiri. Which brings me to Pushpa 2: The Rule, a movie I watched in Telugu without subtitles, and while I didn’t understand a word any of the folks on the cinema screen said, it was an art form that transcended linguistic barriers.

Pushpa 2 isn’t a movie; it’s an emotion, a brilliant celebration of trans-friendly pagan-inspired violence that teaches us that the only way to overcome patriarchal caste barriers is by channelling one’s inner environmentalist and seriously reducing the world’s carbon footprint by committing mass murder.

At the time of writing, Pushpa 2 is on its way to joining the Rs 1000 crore club worldwide, which has led to the usual whinging from movie critics who argue that the movie has no plot. Which probably is true, but it doesn’t matter because cinema is a true indicator of the free market and free will. Most folks would rather go and watch stitched reels of Allu Arjun doing Allu Arjun things than, say, an arthouse film on light and darkness. (unless lightsabres are involved).

That’s in no way a reflection of the intellect of the audience, and it is only brutes and illiterates who think they have some moral higher ground because they watch Game of Thrones instead of Tarak Mehta Ka Oolta Chasma. It’s simply people exercising their free will and deciding how to spend their money.

Most recently, a Bollywood director – who put a lynching scene like an item song in a popular OTT show – was complaining that Pushpa 2 was being played on all screens instead of All We Imagine As Light.

That’s simply because people in the movie business are there to make money, not to flagellate what the elite considers great cinema. One could put all the shows as All We Imagine As Light instead of Pushpa 2 and still end up with empty theatres simply because the audience doesn’t want to go to a theatre to spend money on someone’s struggles. There’s a very real way to measure qualitative cinema, and that’s through quantitative success.

The struggle in life is enough, and we’d much rather go and see a man whose legs and hands are tied do a Mike Tyson while Aigiri Nandini plays in the background. Now that, to borrow a line from Martin Scorsese, is ‘cinema’. Read more.