There is a known psychological state known as semantic satiation. It is a cognitive state similar to my favorite economic theory “The law of diminishing marginal utility”, which postulates that the more we have of an experience( incessantly repeated in increasing doses) the significance and value we derive from it will proportionately decrease. In the present case, I am referring to semantic satiation caused by the new web series on Netflix, Rana Naidu. The relentless use of profanity, swearing, imprecations, and cussing that permeates this series dulls our cognitive ability and emotional sensibilities. Each episode of Rana Naidu features an unending stream of creative expletives couched in the form of dialogues. The series itself is an Indian remake of Ray Donavan, a popular seven-season American series of a family man, a dilettante, who cleans up the dirty work done by those in power and money. After the third or fourth episode of Rana Naidu, we cross the rubicon, the threshold of semantic satiation. At this point, we even fail to notice anymore the torrent of references to the penis, sex, vagina, and excrement, that flow forth unhindered and uncensored from the mouths of every character in the drama, except the children ( oh well, that boundary is also breached, towards the end). In short, we are numbed. Whether that is a good thing or not, I will leave it to the viewers of this web series to decide for themselves.
There isn’t much to write about Rana Naidu, except that it is a story of the weirdest family you will or have ever seen on screen. The Father Naga Naidu ( played by accomplished Telegu actor Venkatesh) is a thief, a womanizer, a man who cannot stop talking, and a strange father who thinks it is cool to talk to his children about how good their mother was in bed. The series begins with Naga’s return after a fifteen-year sentence in jail for a crime he did not commit to Mumbai, to unite with his family. Naga’s son Rana ( played by Rana Daggubati of the Bahubali fame) detests his father for reasons too many to enumerate and run too deep to fathom; he runs a professional team of savvy bouncers who are devilishly loyal to him, to rescue the powerful in the city of Mumbai from their foulest crimes, gravest misdemeanors and grossest infidelities; Rana’s brothers from the same mother ( it is unfortunate, but important to emphasize this in the context of this series) – Tej and Jaffa, the former a stunt master and the only male character with an iota of morality in the drama suffers from Parkinson’s but still finds the sexual drive to have an affair with a married woman who also happens to be his masseuse; his younger brother Jaffa, a victim of child abuse under a self-styled godman ( the God-man himself plays an important role at the beginning and at the end of the series), turns out an alcoholic and displays all the characteristics of a psychologically bruised young man whose boyhood was forcibly violated and taken away from him. Rana’s wife ( played by Surveen Chawla, Hate Story 2 fame) is an accommodative housewife, a good mother, and a popular actress in movies before marrying Rana; she spends all ten episodes of the series discovering who her husband truly is, peppering her brief conversations and monologues with liberal doses of swears and curses aimed specifically at Rana and sometimes at the world in general. Then, we have a politician with a white wig, who experiences weird hallucinations at the most inappropriate moments, has half his brain removed through surgery, but still functions with enough libido to make love and impregnate his voluptuous sister-in-law, and finds time to organize, direct and fund Rana’s clandestine rescue operations. Where there is Ashish Vidyarthi, villainy is close by. This marvelous and underutilized actor has played the role of a villain in every form and type, however, in Rana Naidu, he gets to extend his repertoire a notch. He gets a blowjob out of nowhere from his mistress – I am sure, a new one for him as well. Add to this mix of eccentric and screwed-up characters is an actor name “Prince”, the quintessential Indian cinema hero, whose insecurities, addictions, and overwhelming guilt merges with the Naidu family story in inexplicable ways. In between all this turbulence of egos, there are enough mistresses who populate the screenplay ( including Suchitra Pillai, an accomplished theatre artist who appears as a casual sex partner, a completely wasted role for such a talented actress), illegitimate children who make appearances and are as screwed in character as the others, casual sex partners who get killed like chickens along the way and precocious boys and girls who tug at the seams of sexual concupiscence. The entire series is a dizzying sequence of depravity, violence, foul-mouthed characters, and demeaning sexuality. The Naidu family and the villain in the series hail from Hyderabad and speak the Hyderabadi tongue. I spent my formative college years in Hyderabad, and the dialect of Hindi spoken there – an eclectic mix of base Hindi and Urdu – is unique and easily distinguishable in a group. In fact, the Hyderabadi tongue is a corruption of classical Hindi, and to those who speak Hindi in its pure form, the Hyderabadi slang, its accent, the emphasis, and distortions in the pronunciations, can be jarring to the ears.
Since OTT platforms do not fall under the purview of Indian censors, content creators can go berserk in their use of the medium to portray sex and violence. Take the first ten minutes of Rana Naidu’s pilot episode, for instance; it will take a while for viewers to understand what the hell just happened on screen, until a character, almost as a side note, briefly explains the nature of the crime over the phone to Rana. Even then, if you are from the old school, you may need help to decipher the sexual grossness of the operation just performed. God forbid, If you have made the mistake of watching the episode along with kids, I can promise that you will have a hard time explaining the whole thing to them. These first ten minutes set the tone for the rest of the episodes. It is as if the producers, especially BVS Ravi, who wrote the screenplay had nothing better in his vocabulary than a string of abuses, swears, and cusses to express even the most sublime of thoughts. I don’t mean to indicate that what gets depicted or spoken in the series does not happen in real life; it does; but in the context of the series, the story it proposes to tell, the whole process of filling the screen with as much grossness as possible seems so exaggerated, and unnecessary, as if the creators only aim was to shock the audience into a state they haven’t bargained for.
Actor Venkatesh is known for his decent roles in Telugu films since 1985. Even while playing the role of an angry protagonist, which Venkatesh has done so many times, I haven’t seen Venkatesh relinquish his standards of verbal decency. However, the sheer number of expletives uttered by Venkatesh in these ten episodes would, perhaps, far exceed the number of swear words he ever had to utter in his career spanning seventy-five films. Venkatesh does the job well, but it is painful to watch him play Naga’s role. Rana Dagubatti ( Venkatesh’s nephew in real life) in the past, has essayed a number of angry young man roles on screen. In fact, he revels in such roles. In this series, as the defiant, angry, self-absorbed, maniacal, and clinical dispenser of justice with a zeal to protect his family against misfortune and his father, Rana does a good job. The few times he manages to smile, he looks pleasing. I think Rana should do that more often in his roles.
Rana Naidu set me thinking on a different track though. I began wondering why profane words are so emotionally charged in the first place, and make us uncomfortable when we hear them. What makes the word “prick” sound worse than “penis”, “cunt” than “vagina” or “shit” than “feces”, when all of them are synonyms of the same things they refer to. The answer to this question will take us deep into linguists and the way language is wired in the brain. Each word has a denotation and a connotation. A denotation is a symbol, and the connotation is the meaning attached to the symbol. Over millennia, the human brain has evolved and enlisted different parts of the brain to handle language. The neocortex, the most recent part of the human brain is the predominant symbol-processing unit, and the more ancient limbic systems, including the amygdala, are where connotations that have deep emotional resonance are stored. They are generally known as the left and the right brains respectively. While the left brain unwraps the symbols, the right is the seat of our emotional responses. A patient with an Aphasiac condition can lose their ability to control normal language processed by the left brain but can continue to utter swear words with full force. The link between words and their meaning is not something we can voluntarily control all the time. Though we like to believe it is possible, in reality, the limbic systems respond to the stimulus of a word much before the rational parts of the brain can correct or repress it. In other words, it is easy to make someone uncomfortable with your words even if you didn’t mean to. The listener has no choice. Search for the Stroops test in Google, if you are interested. It is a fascinating test that can be taken online. This simple and effective test unequivocally confirms that human beings have difficulty ( or impossible in some cases) in ignoring the emotional reactions to taboo words once they are seen or heard. Word meanings become almost reflexive over time, and we have no control over the negative emotional response they can generate. Therefore creative writers/speakers carefully use taboo words to sway readers/listeners, often against their will. It is interesting how words that refer to the same thing can cause diametrically opposite reactions. Just as an illustration consider the words “shit” and “feces, they mean the same – which is excrement, however, the former, when used, evokes a strong emotional negative whiplash, and the latter sounds milder and benign. A medical diagnostic center will never ask you to bring your shit to test but only request you to bring a sliver of your feces – which we gladly oblige ( often with a sense of gratitude that it is good for us). It is not that taboo or swear words themselves are repugnant or offensive, but their connotations, often lost and buried deep inside the brain, involuntarily erupt forth when the word is seen or heard causing a sense of disgust and revulsion. Blame the architecture of the human brain for it.
On a similar note, the F…. word is universally considered in bad taste, and offensive. Once again though F…. And “making love” essentially means sex, F… is considered derogatory, non-consensual, and offensive, and making love has a gentle feel about it. Interestingly, the first known use of the F… word was identified on the margins of a 1528 manuscript copy of Cicero’s ( the great Roman orator) De Officiis. A monk had scribbled on the margins of one of its pages “ fuckin Abbot”. We don’t know what caused the monk to write these words: whether he questioned Abbot’s morals, or was he angry with him for some reason. But, it is clear the monk was unhappy. All the words we swear with or consider taboo fall under the broad categories of sex, excretion, religion, death, infirmity, and disfavored groups. Words don’t start out as taboo, but slowly transform themselves into one as time goes by and new interpretations are added. For instance, It wasn’t considered derogatory to use the word “Nigger” in public before the 1960s, but now, it is prohibited and taboo. Or how the word “Bloody” was once an anathema to use in polite society, but now, even children’s stories liberally use the word for shock effect.
Freedom of speech is a basic human right, and most democratic constitutions enshrine that right in their constitutions. But such freedom stands abrogated under special circumstances, for instance, when speech induces violence or misrepresents facts, is fraudulent or libel. There is one more category that the government can potentially regulate – words that are obscene. While the first four cases of restraint are fairly straightforward and should rightfully fall under government regulation, the fifth case of controlling obscene words is not so straightforward. What is and is not obscene varies with time, usage, and values. While private media outlets can censor what their audiences would like to hear, and many of them in fact do establish strict codes of conduct for their presenters, anchors, and content creators, it is debatable whether national governments should be involved in the process. There have been instances where laws to prohibit the use of certain words were introduced in the legislature in the USA and miserably failed. This is a slippery slope, and there always exists this tension between what words are acceptable and what are not.
My apologies for the digression in the above few paragraphs. Coming back to Rana Naidu, the series left me with mixed feelings. There was good potential in the storyline, and had good performers in it; but at the end of the day, it failed to make an impact. I enjoyed the creative use of Hyderabadi Hindi, and the energy Venkatesh and his nephew Rana brought to the role. I liked the boldness of the creative team in nonchalantly breaking taboos and barriers in the narrative style, but in many places, the effort look contrived and unnecessary. There were certainly moments of deep sensitivity, love, and beauty sprinkled across episodes, but again, those few moments were buried under the debris of gross profanity, exploitative sexuality, and meaningless violence. I recall the words of my favorite writer, linguist, and cognitive scientist – Steven Pinker, from his brilliant book “The stuff of thought, language as an insight into Human nature”. “Language is a weapon, and people should be mindful of where to aim it and when to fire. The common denominator of taboo words is the act of forcing a disagreeable thought on someone, and it’s worth considering how often one really wants one’s audience to be reminded of excrement, urine, and exploitative sex. Even in its mildest form, the lazy use of profanity can feel like a series of jabs in the ribs”
That is exactly how I feel about Rana Naidu – not just as jabs, but as full-powered cuts across the face.