D Vivek Dhareshwar I Tejaswini Niranjana us the euphoria of consumerism, as in the Take it easy, Urvasi' song sequence, the film points to the explicit fashioning of the new consumer by staging the song like an advertisement, and posing its protagonists against advertising hoardings. Where Mani Ratnam's films naturalize upper caste, middle class privilege, Kaadalan renders the markers of such privilege mobile, making them available for interrogation and resigni-fication. One example of such mobility is the wearing of blue jeans by the hero's sidekick Vasant (played by the comedian Vadivelu); the film focusses on Vasant's jeans during the 'Urvasi' song, part of the signficance of this apparel being that Vasant is wearing his jeans on top of a 'traditional' loincloth, a matter of great humiliation for him when the Governor's security guards make him strip to establish that he is not hiding anything under his trousers.15 Blue jeans before the era of liberalization in India have been a marker of westernized modernity and a privilege of upper class-caste youth, and part of the present-day transformation of the South Indian urban landscape can be seen in the appropriation of blue denim by young lower caste-class men. The male dalit body is fashioned in the film as a 'modern' body, and our attention is sought to be drawn to the process of its fashioning. In contrast, the modern body in Mani Ratnam's films is naturalized as the middle class, upper caste body (the body of the actor Arvind Swamy in Roja and Bombay, for instance, where one sees the convergence of the MTV body and the anti-Mandal body), whereas in Kaadalan this naturalness is prised apart, and the MTV body is foregrounded as the actor Prabhudeva's dalit body. In a short sequence on the beach where Prabhu and his friends are talking about Shruti, one of the young men says to Prabhu that the (upper-caste) heroine will not be interested in him because he doesn't look like Mani Ratnam's hero Arvind Swamy. Towards the end of the film, there Number 29