Shyama, a pregnant woman refugee from Sri Lanka arrives on Indian shores during the LTTE conflicts, delivers her girl child, and chooses to leave the infant behind before heading back. In this same small town resides Thiru, a young Tamil fiction writer who sees the child and incorporates her into the story that he is writing.
When Indra the neighbouring young college girl reads this story, she insists that he should take her to see this little baby. At the medical camp, Indra is smitten by the tender, beautiful yet helpless girl. Touched by her deep love, Thiru comes back later to the medical camp and proposes that he will adopt this child. When he is told that adoption can awarded only if he is married, Thiru proposes marriage to Indra. But Indra is not so easy to win over. She wants total commitment on his part before they venture into the marital path to bring the baby into the real world and not as a character of his fictional arena. Some years pass by andwhen this little girl gets older and comes to know about her biological mother in Sri Lanka, she demands to be taken there. And when they all meet the mother, a Sri Lankan Tamil rebel soldier now, it is left to the young girl and the two mothers to take the final decision.
This is Mani’s trump card, getting his women characters to conduct the rhetoric of choice and then subject their men to either accept or reject their decisions. With this approach Mani inverts his mentor K. Balachander’s stratagem into a new feminist approach. For hard-wired cultural theorists, all this logic will just not fly! But the urban audiences, for whom he keeps making one film after the other, this is his most preferred manner.
At age 66, with over 28 directorial ventures and another 15 productions under his belt, Mani Ratnam is clearly geared up to make many more in the years to come. But will he be able to retain and entertain the next millennial generation who are hooked on to their devices like heart-lung ventilators needing their constant digital feed for survival? The next change in our socio-political scenario will tell us.