freshlime

“ Insult aanu, Murali, ee lokathile ettavum valiya investment ”. This famous line from a Malayalam movie roughly means that the biggest investment in the world is ‘insult’. And fittingly, just like the title Vellam which means water —an element that exists as solid, liquid, or gas; insult too morphs across different states of matter. It can manifest as a spoken word, a simple deed, or a mere patronizing stare. Whichever form it takes, every insult hurled out at another has the capability to snowball into something far bigger than the insult itself! I remember one of the most thrilling chapters for me in my history textbook at school. The East India Company’s introduction of the Enfield rifle cartridges—greased with beef and pig fat—perceived not merely as administrative oversight, but as a deliberate insult to the religious purity of Hindu and Muslim sepoys. On May 9, 1857, eighty-five sepoys in Meerut refused to bite the cartridges. By the next evening, Meerut had exploded. It wasn...