Several Shades of Grey
How can we define our identity? Riddles from ‘Vikram Vedha’
The 2022 Hindi film Vikram Vedha, a remake of the 2017 Tamil film of the same name, starts off as a simple tale of cops and robbers. Saif Ali Khan’s Vikram is introduced as an upright police officer, who is on the trail of Hrithik Roshan’s Vedha. Vedha is introduced as a feared criminal, who commits daring murders, robberies, and more, often right under the noses of the police or rival gangs.
However, the real conflict here is soon revealed to be between Vikram’s and Vedha’s beliefs. Vikram frames people and situations in black-and-white, and has utmost confidence in his framing — he claims early on in the movie that he can look into someone’s eyes and immediately ascertain if they are good or evil. Vedha instead believes that everyone is characterized by shades of grey, and uses riddles and stories as he attempts to drive home this point to Vikram.
Throughout the movie, alongside the numerous action sequences, we are introduced to the question of what defines one’s identity — a thorny question whose answer derives from various complex and ambiguous factors.
A matter of reflection
Vikram Vedha lays out an intriguing premise — that our identity is defined not by our selves alone, but in relation to another person or situation. As Vedha highlights in the movie, Raavan (a demon king in the Hindu mythological epic Ramayana) played a pivotal role in carving the identity of Rama (the legendary prince, and later king, and eponymous protagonist of the Ramayana) — Rama’s legend is a consequence of his battle with, and victory over, Raavan. Similarly, our own identities are often intertwined with, and defined in the reflection of something or someone else — the challenges we face, the work we do, the people in our lives, and so on. By this reading, our identities are defined less by any intrinsic qualities that we have, but more based on how we leverage these qualities in the various contexts we come across. As motivational speakers often remind us, we are what we repeatedly do.
As an additional consequence of this definition of identity as a reflection of something or someone else, worlds often exist in reflected pairs, and these are often characterized by how they are perceived (and not just what they actually are) — if we see someone in a positive or negative light, it is highly probable that they feel the same way about us. At the start of the movie, Vikram sees Vedha as a villain due to his criminal activities; similarly, Vedha sees Vikram as a villain due to his naive beliefs that (in Vedha’s eyes) prevent Vikram from apprehending the true criminals.
At a basic level, this is evident in our categorization of people as friends and enemies, which is usually mirrored by their categorization. At a deeper level, this is key to the definition of anyone’s identity — it is a matter of how we look at them. Extrapolating this, our own definitions of our self-identities are a consequence of how we look at ourselves; but this may not be the same as someone else’s view of our identity. We could be the hero or villain of our own story, as well as of someone else’s — perception is everything. Sometimes to understand someone else’s actions or beliefs, it is important to “flip the map” — only then can we potentially empathize with, or at least contextualize, their identity.
Defining a positive identity then is a matter of doing the best we can to be a hero to as many as possible. As a starting point for this, we need to ensure we are heroes in our own stories by doing the best we can in the contexts we face and for the people we care for— and perhaps that journey of self-improvement and self-love can help guide our choices, and define a positive self identity in more eyes than our own.
A matter of framing
In many ways, the two leads of Vikram Vedha are similar, almost two sides of the same coin — both kill people with alarming frequency, both care deeply about their families, and both seek to help those who they believe are in need. When confronted by moral and ethical dilemmas (as posed through Vedha’s stories and riddles), both make similar choices — but at the start, only one of them, namely Vikram, is perceived as representing good, while Vedha is perceived as representing evil.
Over the course of the movie Vikram Vedha, our opinions of these lead characters ebb and flow as we learn more about their identities. We start out by placing the characters on a good-evil axis; over the course of the movie, we realize that this is a simplistic definition, and the first addition is that of a second axis, characterizing the leads’ attitudes towards the law — leading to the creation of the lawful/chaotic and good/evil alignment chart that many of us would have seen.
Which then leads to the obvious question — how are laws defined, and how are right and wrong defined? In the movie, the placement of the leads in different segments of the chart is a consequence not just of what they do repeatedly and their reflected worlds, but also a consequence of others’ actions. The simplistic system we defined earlier, where an identity exists in reflection of something and/or someone else, now expands to a more complex system where multiple such pairs interact to define our identity.
Vedha uses anecdotes and riddles to demonstrate that their actions and principles can only be analyzed in the light of the others around them, and the situations all of them are placed in — their family members, the other police officers Vikram works with, the other members of Vedha’s gang, and rival gang members. The movie cleverly uses these supporting characters to characterize the shades of grey in both Vikram and Vedha, as well as in the supporting characters themselves — each of them is motivated by their own moral compasses, and the line between good and evil is blurred, so much so that Vedha argues it is actually a circle, with everyone within the circumference.
Our identities thus become a consequence of not just what we do repeatedly, but the contexts in which we operate, and the people we associate with. We do not control the former, and do not have complete control over the latter — but we can only define our identities within the boundaries set by these constraints.
Consequently, we can define a positive self-identity by calibrating our actions to our situations — if we have a privilege or advantage, that should act as a strong motivator to us making the best choice for all concerned, especially those less privileged than us. We can also attempt to redefine the boundaries as much as possible by associating with people who are driving a positive view of the world as well as dissociating from those driving a negative view of the world — birds of a feather flock together, after all.
As Vedha points out midway through the movie, context is everything in defining one’s identity — but we can only define the context if we see the complete picture, and that full picture requires us to look not just inwards, but also outwards, to the people and situations around us.
Identity thus is an amalgamation of many pieces — not just our own qualities, but also how we leverage these qualities in various situations and contexts, the reflections and complementarities of the people around us and their actions, and the perceptions of these by us and others. Identity is complex to define — but if it were easier, perhaps it would not be worth as much.
