On my friend’s birthday, me and my friends went to Bella Terra to watch Dev Patel’s Monkey Man. I was very excited since I had previously seen Dev Patel in Slumdog Millionaire and The Man Who Knew Infinity and this was his directorial debut. Without giving any spoilers, I want to give a short description of Monkey Man so the viewers of my comic and this post have some context. Just a disclaimer that Monkey Man is R-rated due to sexual content and explicit language. The story starts off with a mother reading a comic book to her young son about the half-monkey half-man god of Hinduism called Hanuman. Then the movie cuts to the present time where a young man is working a daily job in an underground fight club. He constantly loses each match, while making just enough money to survive. Each fighter must have an animal mask, he chose the monkey. There are repeated flashbacks shown throughout the movie. There are also connections to the story of Hanuman as they show the comic pages during certain scenes. The young man gets a job at a luxury brothel as a dishwasher and soon buys a gun. He plans to kill someone from his past that is at the brothel. He fails and gets heavily injured and chased by the cops. When he finally escapes them, he collapses from his injuries. He wakes up in a temple and is being treated by the people that live in the village that the temple is in. The priest/leader convinces him to stay and heal himself. The scene that is now being described is what I drew in my comic book. Determined to go back and achieve his purpose, he attempts to awkwardly train on a boxing bag since he has had no training. The man who plays the tabla (Indian drums played by hand) sees him trying to train. Through his playing, he explains how to punch; left drums means left hand, right drum means right hand. He begins to play a rhythm to which the young man matches with his punches. He trains day after day until he breaks the punching bag, signifying that he is ready. You can find out what happens next if you watch the movie.

I chose this scene because it was very culturally important to me. No doubt this entire created a new representation for the Indian community because for once, the Indian character isn’t just a body for comedic relief. Sitting in a movie theater full of non Indian people while characters are speaking Hindi was surreal for me. However, this scene combined culture and action in a way I had never seen before, especially not in Indian cinema (even though this is a Hollywood movie). This movie convinced me that Indian cinema does not just have to be songs/dances, copied stories, and CGI action. It can be so much more than that and I think Dev Patel has shown that.