30. Brahman Naman

A team of four quizzers have booze only to puke, approach girls only to get rejected, try for sex only to end up masturbating. This is as accurate and non-judgemental a description of Brahman Naman as I could manage.
One of them is the clear leader of the pack – Naman – who is also a Brahmin supremacist and an absolute jerk to boot. He is crass, rude, ungrateful, pretentious and incorrigibly horny. Nothing wrong with any of these as traits of a movie’s central character. 
Except that each of these traits are so grotesquely exaggerated that they don’t make sense after a point. And the film – one I was looking forward to, as an ex-quizzer – just didn’t work for me. I felt repulsed at some of the scenes but I will ignore that as a personal reaction to something I don’t agree with.

Quizzers – or geeks of any persuasion – are supposed to be obsessed with alcohol and sex. Their interactions with women are supposed to be fraught with nervousness and/or aggression. Misogyny is rampant in quizzing circles. Snobbery is common and meritocracy sometimes reaches absurd levels. Investing a band of quizzers with these characteristics is a natural thing to do but I can’t imagine how horribly wrong they have got the characters and the milieu despite going for the stereotypes.
A quizmaster will never debar a team from a quiz because they ate and drank too much at a previous quiz. It’s a different matter he wouldn’t have the authority either.
No quizzer would ever admit to be “preparing for quizzes” as Naman does. Not even while joking, not even to avoid the worst kind of chipku. You just don’t.
They get the facts right. For example, Royal Challenge is mentioned as an aspirational drink of the mid-1980s. But not the mood. A random student (played by standup comic Biswa Kalyan Rath) describes his sex fantasies in front of a group of random classmates, one of whom happens to be a girl he doesn’t know. Bit of a stretch in the 1980s, no?

So, is this the biggest grouse I have with Brahman Naman? That they get the mood/setting completely wrong and show quizzers – a species I am quite fond of – as horny assholes?
Well, no.
My biggest grouse is that the questions used in the film’s quizzes are alarmingly easy.
The last two questions in the opening quiz – that propels Naman’s Bangalore University team to join the national finals of a quiz – are so easy that Neil O’Brien wouldn’t include them in his prelims. I am commenting on only them since they are the two questions in the film that had a shred of workoutability in them. The overwhelming majority of the questions asked in the film were just of the “Who was…” and “What is…” kinds. To indicate quizzing proficiency, the characters indulge in pseudo-intellectual banter (where one quotes a poet and the other names the source) and lose points because they pronounce answers wrong.

And at the end of it, we get a film that is ‘of little or no value’.


Frivolous Footnote: In a sequence completely unrelated to the film, Sid Mallya plays himself – a spoilt brat hosting booze parties at his mansion in Bangalore. Or since this was set in the 1980s, he was probably playing his father. 

Complimentary Footnote: Netflix has done a great job of making this their first Original offering in India. The demographic who will be interested in this genre is 'bang-on' the demographic who will also be interested in Netflix. 

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