What if Iron Man were from Chennai?
Disclaimer: This is NOT a script for a Put Chutney video!
Let us for a moment, forget what truly exists and allow ourselves to think freely. Say, we are in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), for it allows us a prospect of saving the world, a few too many times.
Namma (The) Avengers (2012)
INT. SEA NIGHT
Out in the Bay of Bengal, TARUN SHIVARAM, in his IRON MAN suit, is cutting a PIPELINE TRANSPORT with a laser cutter coming from his hand. He then places a SHIV ENERGY REACTOR as the sandal that was applied on as a good luck charm, washes off. It lights up.
IRON MAN rockets out of the water into pitch darkness and realises that electricity in the MARINA area is down, yet again. He activates his night vision suit augment as per protocol and flies towards THE LIGHTHOUSE which was popularly owned as the SHIV TOWER.
TARUN
You’re good on this end. The rest is up to you.
PRIYA PATEL
(on the other line) You disconnected the transition lines? Are we off the grid?
INSIDE THE SUIT — PRIYA APPEARS ON HIS HUD MONITOR.
TARUN
SHIV TOWER is about to become a beacon of self-sustaining clean energy.
PRIYA
Wow. So maybe our reactor takes over and it actually works?
TARUN
I assume. Light her up.
As IRON MAN flies to the SHIV TOWER BUILDING, the power is switched on and the SHIV AND SONS sign LIGHTS UP.
PRIYA
How does it look?
TARUN
Like Deepavali, but with more… me.
Cut to 2006.
Tarun tapped his feet nervously as the number dropped by five more. He was keenly observing a monitor that displayed the current number of available seats for B.E. Aeronautical Engineering at MIT, Madras Institute of Technology. Sitting in a crowd of more than a thousand he wondered if he would ever get into his choice-driven dream college. The skepticism increased as each hour passed by, and with his father sitting beside him, it was becoming harder to hide the obvious discomfort.
Tarun’s father, Shivaram, was an alumnus of MIT and had been one of the most over-achieving blokes of his time. He even went on to start his own company, SHIV INDUSTRIES in 1985, just five years after graduating. When Tarun was born in 1988, Howard had a vision for his company, his son and the future of the world. Sitting there, in that room full of people, he wondered if his son would ever be able to be a class apart, in a world where almost everything would be in shortage.
Shivaram, Tarun | ID #1537502 | B.E. Aeronautical Engineering, MIT (affiliated to Anna University, Chennai) | Valid up to 2010
Much like the ID Card printing personnel, Tarun never doubted that he would complete his degree within the four-year regulation. What stood out, though, was not the grades or the number of times he had applied for re-evaluation only to end up with a better one. It was his final year project.
Tarun had created a solar-powered drone which could assess the levels of pollution at any given location through its use of advanced chemical sensors. He was an inspiration in college and went on to take over the company from his father, which was now called SHIVARAM AND SONS. Though he never understood the ‘sons’ part of it, what troubled him most was the complete lack of purpose he felt, unlike his own father.
Through 2010, he reminisced the late night house parties, the road trips and most recreations from his college life. He was a snarky-sociable-nerd and had a huge fan following, especially from the opposite gender. He missed that attention and the present seemed quite bland in comparison. That is when something very small, created a wave of change and from where there was no looking back.
Rain and power outage was the recipe of the season. Every night, for a week, Tarun twisted and turned in the process of trying to sleep, amidst the sultriness of the room and the buzzing of the tiny mosquitoes. The lack of sleep, a weakened immune system and the swarm of blood sucking creatures could only lead to a despicable outcome.
Shivaram, T, Age 22 | Primary Symptom: blood platelets down | Diagnosis: Dengue Fever
The peaking body temperature sent Tarun into a zone of hallucinatory dreams, which mostly involved falling (and jumping) from a great height. As he got better, the dreams acquired safer endings. Parachute backpacks, trampoline landing, and the like meant that he had begun to channel his frustration constructively rather than regressing under its effect. It had reached a point when something pathbreaking struck a chord with his right brain.
A suit.
A suit made of scrap iron.
A suit made of scrap iron with a man inside it.
A manned-suit made of scrap iron that can fly.
A flying manned-suit made of scrap iron that can emit mosquito-killing radio frequency waves.
Finally, Tarun had found his purpose. He had always hated sickness, particularly after his father lost his life to lung cancer just more than an year ago. This experience had pushed him over to a point of frustration that it gave him an implausible idea, but with definite possibilities.
A bigger flying object on a mission to eradicate a much smaller flying thing, for a healthier Chennai.
Courtesy of the left brain, Iron Man, the mosquito killer rose to the forefront of pest control. Electric bat souvenirs, killer coils, repellant liquids; all endorsed and manufactured by SHIVARAM AND SONS, were killing it in the market. The real killer, the buzz of the night and sultry, was still out there.
The problem was much bigger, beyond the mass control of that tiny sociopath.
A cleaner environment for a safer future of Chennai was the utopian reality that blared across.
Cut back to 2012.
For cleaner surroundings, brand Iron Man had made progress in changing the face of the city and its national standing in the list of pest troubles, within just an year.
THE END?
Faster internet, iPhones, fancy cars and everything else that was resource-dependent really had no meaning in a city where a lot was in shortage; water, electricity, food.
Except for hope and Engineers.
As the tower lit up, Tarun landed in his Iron Man suit amidst a group of TV reporters who had gathered inside the building. He was greeted with a barrage of applause as his suit dismantled itself, for the human to emerge.
“We are Iron Man!” said Tarun, as the press conference came to a close.
We are Iron Man? Hold the line, if you are a Grammar Nazi! What Tarun achieved was not an effort of a single man. It took many individuals to create a single positive disruption in the society. He recognised that. He had tapped into the potential of the lakhs who sat in that very room, looking nervously at the screen of redundant numbers, graduating without a purpose exactly four years later and suffer everyday because even money was not enough in a city where almost everything was in shortage.
Every year, in Chennai, lakhs of students graduate out of colleges with an Engineering degree. A self-sustainable future, with or without the need of an Iron Man is not impossible if we all come together to solve any social problem. While anyone can be Batman, together, everyone can be Iron Man.
If Iron Man were from Chennai, he could still be an Engineer.
At Paperman, we believe in being hopeful and optimistic about our future. For that, neither is the past discredited nor is the present squandered. The disruption we bring about is by fixing a point of focus on the brighter side of things.
We synthesise a series of tales called #FactOrFiction to inspire those around us to take a measurable step towards combating the real social villain, that is, waste that has not been recycled. Yet.
by Aravind Kannan, Head of Operations at Paperman
Networking towards a society with no barriers.
