Many have mentioned how this is an example of hyperlink cinema, film which is characterized by a multilinear narrative similar to the experience of the internet, but what I find particularly interesting is in how Ratnam utilizes the internet influence not just in narrative structure but also in the audio-visual, situating the period when Aayitha Ezhuthu was made to further emphasize the impact that the globalization which comes with the internet age has on its characters and their respective bonds to their communities.

Inba is gangster who ends up working as the hitman for corrupt politician Selvanayagam. When student leader Michael opposes Selvanayagam, the politician tries to find ways to dissuade Michael – notably offering him a scholarship to study at a foreign university. Michael doesn't relent, and so Inba is sent to physically threaten Michael to leave politics. At some point Michael runs into Arjun, a young man born into a wealthy family who cares little about his home and wants to migrate to the States. It is during the convergence of Michael and Arjun that Inba enters in and shoots Michael, leaving him critically wounded. This meeting point in which all three intersect is the opening of the film, the in media res functioning akin to landing in the middle of a site and scrambling to gain understanding through context, and the first three of the four chapters acting like individual articles that flesh out the background of each individual leading up to the point of before the final chapter moves forward.

With each article we gain further context into the psychology and environment which shaped each man to better understand what led them to this moment, the threads of Inba and Michael notably dovetailing in the past before those of Michael and Arjun do in the future. Notably, the camerawork in Arjun's chapter becomes more erratic, occasionally producing an overcrank effect, step-printing, and flipping upside down. There's even the occasional large-block pixelation, though ittedly that might be due to the quality of my video rip. In this segment we visit a club and EDM is at its greatest, already having heavily influenced the previous musical scenes (drum and bass is a good look on A. R. Rahman) but outright blaring full-on here. Arjun's is by far the chapter which is the most globalized, and his vague reasons for wanting to move overseas likely due to his disaffection from a wider community. His home is a mansion built under post-modern architecture, and while it is far larger than the homes of Inba and Michael it's far more removed from other people; where Michael refused the offer to study abroad, Arjun's greatest wish is to leave his country.

This explains why he feels like the odd man out, at least initially. Arjun has no community while Michael heads one and Inba is recruited into one, and why the segments with Michael and Inba feel much more closely related. It is only after the trauma of witnessing Michael get shot that Arjun's world-view is violently altered. Now unable to simply exist in his upper-class lifestyle disconnected from what's immediately around him, he is forced to make an ideological decision. By jumping into the river and saving Michael's life, he consciously exits his prior framework of existence and figuratively washes its traces away. Suddenly his world seems much more real and he becomes enmeshed with the lives of many other individuals, and whereas Inba was brainwashed into ing Selvanayagam's corrupt community Arjun makes his own decision to Michael's idealistic one. Arjun, the stand-in for disaffected youth unexposed to politics, is able to find purpose in his life when he no longer exists entirely in a nebulous (virtual) space. From here the story is no longer fragmented but told in unity. Three individuals become their own meta-community.

There is a moment earlier when Michael and Inba are fighting each other and one pleads to the other, "Wait... wait brother... white flag... Brother, please listen to me. Why we are fighting unnecessarily? It's paining brother." It is a realization that although these two are in conflict, they don't have to be, that their conflict is manufactured by others and their lives would be better off if they directed their energy towards their common enemy. Selvanayagam uses the bodies of others to fight for him and stands to gain from everyone else being too busy to oppose him. He doesn't even particularly care about Michael in any way besides wanting to distract him from understanding the real problem. Perhaps this is a stretch, but I was reminded of the ways in which technology doesn't actually care what s believe in. Instead, it only cares that they continue to engage without realizing the manipulation placed on them, and the best way to do so is getting them to fight unnecessarily through outrage. It is hopeful that Michael's own fight with Inba ends voluntarily.