GREY CHARACTERS

A basic format of a story is, there is a protagonist and an antagonist, the former being the good and the latter being the bad. The Villain tries to harm the hero and his family but, towards the end of the story the hero saves them all. This is a very old format, all our religious stories also follow the Hero- Villain format. In all these stories the conflict is always an external factor. But there is another format in which stories can be told, these are the stories with internal conflict and the stories of grey characters.

I will break-down a simple grey character to you, In the movie Yevade Subrahmanyam, Nani plays Subrahmanyam, who is neither a good guy nor a bad guy. He makes his life all about his career that he is sometimes insensitive to the people around him, which he knows and thinks its ok. Now in this movie there is no villain, there is just Subrahmanyam, a guy who never understood the real meaning of life and found happiness in materialistic things, that is the internal conflict of this story. So, the happy ending of this movie is Subrahmanyam finding who he really was and resolve the internal conflict

Another example is the Character of Baby from Oh Baby. Now Baby is not a bad woman but, she is so possessive about her son that she is rude to her daughter-in-law. When both her daughter- in-law and she understand that, the movies gets its happy ending.

Now the character of Subrahmanyam, Baby were very appealing because we know many people with the similar traits around us, or it could also be us. There are no ‘villains’ in our life, we all possess some kind of weakness, insensitivity, selfishness. Maybe we will all get our happy endings if we try to be a good person from within instead of running around to be perfect. Sometimes it’s ok not to be perfect because in the end you should be happy and make people happy.

–M. Bhavya Samhitha